During my stay here, I came across some very interesting facts about China, which my geography teacher failed to teach me. My Chinese friends were so generous, that they provided me with this rare knowledge. I just hope that these facts are really true and they have not got lost in translation! :)
(1) Number four and number seven are the least favourite numbers among Chinese people. According to one of my Chinese friends it is because of the fact, that these two words resemble other not so popular terms: death and poverty. Some buildings even do not have the fourth floor because of that!
(2) Young people of the same age often call each other "brother" or "sister", even though they are not related. I guess they compensate their lack of siblings this way...
(3) It is not right to take pictures of the statues of gods in the temples, because it is considered disrespectful. I have been told about this just recently and I feel guilty every time I go through my pictures from all the temples I visited...
(4) English language is completely useless outside the biggest cities - people in rural areas usually speak only Chinese. I found many of them quite sociable though, I have already had some nice Chinese-Slovakian conversations, which lasted about 5 minutes without any problem.
(5) When somebody has a birthday, he gives his classmates dried meat instead of candies as we do at school. (Did, in my case. It has been a long time, since I celebrated my birthday at school this way.) At least my students do so, I cannot imagine this in poorer parts of China.
(6) They do not have a Name Day in here, because they come up with their own original names. The name usually has two or three syllables, because, as one my Chinese friend says: the name with four syllables would sound too Japanese.
(7) Students during their last year at high school spend there seven days a week, from early mornings until late in the evenings. When I asked one seventeen year old girl about her hobbies, she couldn't really tell me - she has no hobbies, she spends all her time at school: competition is fierce and she want to attend a really good university some day.
(8) People don't care here much about the age limit, when it comes to drinking alcohol. I have read that they set up 18 years old as legal drinking age only in the year 2006, so I guess, they just haven't got used to it yet.
