Possible Last Entry

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So yes, this is possibly my last entry to those of you avid readers of mine (if I have any). It was suggested to me that I continue writing, however I have previously decided that I am no longer a traveler and that this particular blog site may not be suitable for me. Don't worry I will let you know when I select a good blog site for me what my new page is. Also I have recently discovered that the writing on this page is too tiny and very difficult for me to read (as I write).

90/60.
I heard a slightly sad "joke" today in class. I was in a business intermediate class talking to the students about media. One of the students had already brought up the Carrefour incident. For those of you who don't know Carrefour is a French supermarket that has been protested against recently here in China due to it's possible involvement in saying bad things about China (in relation to Tibet) to the French government. However, recently it has been said that the head of Carrefour never said anything towards or against Tibet/China so the protesters are starting to back down. My original question to them was what would you do if you worked for a company that had people protesting it, and they said that they would ignore it unless it was said that the company was saying bad things about Chinese people (like Carrefour). Anyways, after discussing that for a bit my student asked me what I thought about CNN, the fact that (again) CNN had said bad things about the Chinese people in relation to Tibet. My answer was if you're going to protest CNN all for ya. Jia you! (as the Chinese say which is a kind of cheer and means something like "I wish you luck" or "Go Team"). I told her that I was completely against CNN as I knew that it, along with all popular American media channels is controlled by the government (not that there aren't other channels in the US that aren't good just that CNN isn't one of them). She then said that she'd heard that 90% of Chinese media is true and only 60% of foreign media. Now, anyone who knows anything about China knows this is complete bullshit but it's the only logical thing for a Chinese person to think as so much of the world has been hidden from them their whole lives so my only comment to her was "that's what I would expect most Chinese people to think". Speaking of media this is something that's gotten my brain confused for quite a while now and if anyone knows the answer please let me know. The Chinese government has hidden so much of the bad press for a really long time, probably since the Cultural Revolution. Why in the World is the Chinese government allowing the Chinese people to see all of the reactions that other countries are having to the Olympic torch being passed around? I've been told that China is passing it's own Olympic torch around from city to city but here in China this is not the big news that the media is portraying. The news that the media is portraying is the worldwide Olympic torch, and along with it all of the bad press about China. Again, what I don't understand is why are the Chinese people being shown this news? This is no new news to the Western world, Free Tibet. What's new about that? But to the Chinese people this is new news, so why not hide it like the government has been doing everything else?

Anyways, just a question to lay out there. Recently my mother-in-law has been here living with us. I don't mind it too much, she only does a few things that really annoy me, like when she yawns it sounds like a freaking bloody high-pitched screech. And I have big problems with eating around her. When I get home from working all day all I want is a little snack, like popcorn or cheese and crackers (yes, I managed to get my first two packs of cheese! they're from the Metro nearby, another supermarket chock-full with imported goods). But she won't let me eat if she's making something "I'm making a meal you can have snack later," she says. But I don't want to eat a whole meal, it'll just make me fat (or uncomfortable as I've already eaten a meal earlier). All I want is my snacks. When I first had my snacks I let her try them "if it had sugar in it it would be good" she often said - about the popcorn and the grits that I made. Grits with sugar? Are you kidding me? I think Chinese people have an awful sweet tooth sometimes, they even like their bread sweet! It's like candy bread, yuck! I think no matter how long I'm here for I'll never get over their bread. That's one of the biggest differences between here and India. I think that Indian food is relatively similar to American food so it's pretty easy to get used to. Plus the things that aren't like American food taste completely different and are still good (and good for you). Here Chinese people like really strange things that my mouth just can't get used to. Like silk worms. And they like really strange smelling/tasting things like sea cucumbers! Plus when they make dishes they often put WAY too much oil or salt in them like they're trying to overcompensate for something. The hardest thing for me to eat in India was their desserts and after a couple months I even got used to those. But I've been here almost 3 years and I still haven't gotten used to some of these foods!

Back to my mother-in-law, it's also a little annoying to have someone around all the time and so close to your room when you're a newlywed. I think if our apartment were bigger and she wasn't so close to ours then it wouldn't be that bad.

I don't know if this is something that I've mentioned before or not but culture shock is really different here than it was in India. When I was in India for the first couple months I really did feel like I was in a ride at Disneyland where I could taste, touch, feel, smell, hear and say everything I wanted to but where part of my brain still knew I was really only in a ride at Disneyland. It really messed with my moods, throughout the course of one day I would be thrown from one mood of extreme to another, from extreme joy to extreme sorrow to extreme disgust and many others. But here in China culture shock is an extremely odd concept. When I first got here there was no culture shock. Nothing at all, it was like going to New York. Ok, I'm in New York, it's different, big deal. Only after staying here for a long time, probably almost a year, did I really start to get culture shock. And it was from two things, doing things I didn't normally do (which is one thing in common with India, I also got culture shock from doing that) and the second being understanding the Chinese mind more in depth. The deeper I get into Chinese thinking the more culture shock I get, granted now it doesn't happen quite as much cause there are things in the Chinese mind that I've gotten used to but there definitely are things still there that shock me.

I took a taxi yesterday to get to the mall next to my building and the taxi driver was super talkative. Surprisingly enough I agreed with most of what he was saying. This is surprising because some taxi drivers here are just complete out of their mind nuts. This particular taxi driver was telling me what he thought about Japan, that he thought Japan to be a very smart country because they had taken a whole bunch of good ideas and put them together to form one country. They had taken the industrial revolution from the US and the culture/language from China and mixed them up. As opposed to China, he said, which had a long history but had only opened it's doors in the past 20 years and already was taking things from other countries that weren't so good, like oil-fueled cars (and thousands of other things here). I completely agree with him.

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