China thoughts...

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THOUGHTS IN:

1) Regular letter size (A4) paper is significantly longer than Canadian letter sized paper.
I know. i was so amazed that i believed it warranted the spot of #1 on the "China thoughts list"

2) boys smell. they smell fully, they eat meat that smells funny. ...
AND they're boys are gross. I gave my boys a test, and i see a student with his finger up his nose diggig' away, THEN, he switches hands, and starts cleaning out his other nostril. These gunked-up fingers then make their way onto the test, then later, i get handed back a test with brownish yellow-green stains on it. Ew.

2b) Boys here always seem to have stomach aches. Every class i get a kid running up to me, holding his stomach, and a giganto roll of toilet paper begging to go to the washroom. I guess it's not surprising considering the amount of oily food they eat, topped off with 2 bowls worth of rice.

3) All you can eat sushi is AMAZZZZIINNGG here! $8 canadian can get you all you can eat of delissshhh sushi + other types of japanese cuisine, like yaki-tori, katsus, and others. All you can eat dessert included. i'm coming back to canada fat.

4) i STILL have the mandarin skills equivalent to a 1 year old local chinese kid.

5) Lady Gaga is supper popular in China. Thus making her the ugliest international superstar.

6) Tampons don't exist in China.

7) Christmas here is completely commercialized, has lost all meaning, and i'm pretty sure that 98% of China doesn't know the true history of Christmas.
Wait a minute. that's no different from Canada. ha. never mind.

8) I tried fishfeet - basically placing your feet into a bucket full of fish, and then having them eat your dead skin. so we get to the spa, all ready and excited to dip in our feet into a bucket of fish, but in reality we find that we would be placing our whole body into a POOL of fish.
annnd, everything is done via nudity filled bathhouse. yes. YMCA changeroom nudity.
So being the only westerners there, we feel super awkward, and refuse to get completely naked in front of each other, so out we go wearing panties and bras.
So it's a hot spring spa, and there's different pools (hot tubs, "silver" pools (ya, no idea what that is), saunas) AND there's different body RUB stations, where workers SCRAPE your whole body to get rid of dead skin. now this is all done in the open, so while we're hanging out in the hot tub, we're staring right at a fat, saggy, wrinkly, hairy, stretch mark-y, chinese woman getting the scrub down from a worker. .....
fat being jiggled in different directions, saggy boobs being massaged, and disgusting black dead skin being scraped off. ugghhhh. and of course, once the dead skin is scraped off, the towel is cleaned via a quick flick of a wrist, spreading all the dead skin onto the floor....hideously close to the hot tub we were soaking in.

so we ignore all this, and go back to our inital goal of the fish.
and the pool is full of these finger tipped sized grey fish, and so i put my feet in, and MAN. it was a WEIRD feeling! Tickled so much! i had to pull my feet out multiple times, giggling. It was like having soft pinches, but dozens at a time, on the bottom of your feet. i'm sure the chinese women sure had a hell of a time watching three non-naked foreigners squealing, cracking up laughing, exclaiming "ew! ew! ew!", whilst shaking and waving hands in an exaggerated fashion.
but after the initial shock, you start to get used to having the fish pecking at you.

so after a while of having the fish at my feet, i figure, my knee has a lot of dead skin, so in goes my knees into the pool. then i decide that my thighs have a lot of dead skin, and in goes my thighs, and before i knew it, my whole body was in the pool, and i'm having fish pecking at my stomach, hands, chest, back, and shoulders. ...and no. my underwear was still on.
but it was neat to see where the majority of the dead skin was on your body - as the fish congregated specifically to those parts!
it was definitely a crazy fun feeling! there were times, when i swear there were a hundred fish all over my body.
pinch your hand softly, and then imagine hundreds of those pinches spread over all over your body.

but anyway, after a hour or so in that pool, fish were still eating our dead skin. so we decided that there was no way we would get all the dead skin off (we're dirty foreigners.), and so concludes, our fish body experience!

9) i ate a bowl of beef noodles for $1Cad for dinner. i was full.

10) People in China have no sense of personal space. went to China Walmart (quite disappointing. no "rolling" discounts, and happy-faced button greeters), and people were SHOVED UP against me. PLUS chinese ppl are very willing, and always will, bud in line at the checkout counter!! grrr.....

10b) Sales people have no sense of personal space. you walk into a clothing store, and right away a chinese employee is glued to you, acting as a shadow and falling your every move around the store. needless to say, i have bought very little since moving to china.

11) on the subway/train, it's not civilized at the platform!!! when a train comes in, it's a free-for-all, and unlike toronto where we politely and patiently wait for the ppl on the subway to exit, then make space for the older ladies and gentlemen to get on first, then allow those with little children to enter, then courteously allow all those around us to go in first before getting on, NO. opposite in China.
When a train gets in and those doors open, ppl getting on crowd the door, leaving no space for those exiting, and they SHOVE on.
screw the old ladies, screw the young, screw the disabled, as long as they get a seat, they're happy. heck, half the time it's the little old ladies and men who are doing the most pushing.
this effectively makes the whole process 10x slower.
whoever said chinese ppl were smart and efficient. lied.

12) Taiwan is a super touchy subject here in china. Even though the UN and the rest of the world recognizes it as an independent country, no one in China agrees. I let my kids do a test on sporcle.com about naming the countries of the world, and as the kids realized that they could name Taiwan as a country, they became increasingly more and more angry. One even went as far as yelling out angrily "Fuck this quiz." After scolding him for his language, i quickly changed the topic...

13) It's cold here. Really. really cold. AND it snows!! It's colder, and snows more than Toronto. WHAT AM I DOING HERE!?
I went to Harbin (Northern China - near the border of Russia), and it was -30 degrees C.
I walk outside - and my nostrils immediately froze shut.
And all electronic devices were effectively made useless due to the cold. Batteries zapped in minutes!

14) Despite the cold, women are still seen strutting around in high heels and tights, while i'm clunking around in 2 pairs of long johns, sweat pants, and Ugg(h) boots.

15) Yes. I now, after much compalin and mockery of its hideousness, own Ugg boots. Except they're fake Uggs - ergo. I own fuggs.

16) The school is not heated. well it is, but for some reason, the doors and windows are still kept open. Not very energy efficient. and once again going back to the fact that whoever said the Chinese were efficient, lied.

17) B.C. is weird. In BC, 86% means an A. Not 80%, not 81%, but 86%. If i was in BC during MY high school years - i would have been a straight B student. This effectively means that BC'rs are 6% smarter than us Ontarioans.

18) I ALWAYS smells like Chinese restaurant now.

19) The janitors in our school do the exact same thing the whole day. There's likeeee...10 janitors in our campus, and all they do is mop one section of the school, then the bell rings, and kids trudge around and dirty up the floor a little, then, when the kids go to their respective classes, the janitors re-mop their same assigned section. Repeat 5 more times, and call it a day.

20) So i'm in the airport, and i see the cutest little 3 year old Chinese girl running around. Wearing a cute little pink backpack, with a cute little matching pink and white sweater, with a cute little pink bow on her head, and cute little pink pants..and..WHAT THE? Sticking out of her cute little pink pants was a pair of bare buttocks! then she waddles over to me, sits on the chair next to me, and then ...opens her legs. and then..WHOA. young child genitals for the world to see. i quickly avert my eyes, slightly embarrassed at what i witnessed. But it dawns on me that the parents don't care. if the kid needs to go, there's no need to find a restroom, take off the pants of the squirming child, and then sit him/her down onto the toilet, nope! it's much easier just to pick a spot on the street (doesn't need to be hidden, can be in a crowded area if need be), and allow the kid to squat. no need to take off the pants, because with the two gaping holes on both front and rear of the pants, number 1 OR 2 can be accommodated!
i guess the Chinese can be quite efficient afterall.

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