Burbuja Galactica: Chronicles of China

Chronicles of China

6 Comments Published by Carolina on Tuesday, October 04, 2005 at 5:23 PM.

Ok, so we´ve made it through our first two weeks in China without starving, getting lost or food poisoned.

There are so many things I´d like to tell you about, that I wouldn´t know where to start; so I´ve decided to divide it into chapters, to make it easier for yout to understand, and for me to tell.

CHAPTER ONE: Getting Around

If you think you can get around a city in China without knowing the language, just by knowing your road´s name; then you´ve got another thing coming, mate! For your road´s name, whatever it is, there´ll be a thousand different pronunciations; and whichever one you choose, chances are it won´t be the one your taxi driver understands. You can always carry around a card, where your lovely secretary wrote it down, but chances are the taxi driver can´t read either!! But don´t get desperate, you´ll eventually get the hang of it; or you´ll start learning the way and just pointing to the driver. In the meantime, get ready to overpay for a lot of taxi rides.

And speaking of taking taxis, I strongly recommend you don´t, if you suffer from any sort of heart problem or nervious disorder. Actually, some heart medications should warn you about it: “do not take this medication if you plan to ride on a rollercoaster within the next two hours, or if you´re taking a cab in China”.

They´re crazy!! everybody drives like crazy!! And you can take my word for it, because I grew up in Dominican Republic! All cars avoid hitting each other and pedestrians and bikes by mere inches! And if you´re not in a car it´s even worse, because it means you´re walking, trying to find your way around the zillion cars coming from all directions, and the zillionx2 bicycles ringing their little bells, telling you to get the f$%& out of the way!!

But like Alex said, no matter how mad the traffic is, they most be doing something right, because you hardly ever see traffic jams.

CHAPTER TWO: Shopping

My first night in China, I visited the supermarket around the corner. That was my first encounter with the whole country´s atmosphere of over-population, right there and then, in that micro-cosmos.

I never thought you could fit so many people into a supermarket! It was hard to believe people could push trolleys through that maze of humans; but somehow we did as well.

You´d think I would have been prepared for the aisles and aisles of products with nothing but Chinese letters written on them, but I naively wasn´t. I found it really funny, that first night, how I had to figure what everything was just from looking at the pictures. I didn´t find it so funny after a couple of days, when I spent almost an hour looking for soja milk.

Eventually we discovered that there was a “Wo Má” (Wal Mart) in town, and that was our light at the end of the tunnel. I still haven´t been able to find salt though; it´s like it doesn´t even exist here. “yén? Meio, meio”..that´s all I hear from every shop assistant in Fuzhou, “we don´t have salt”, “we´ve heard of it, we´ve even seen it a couple of times in our lives, but sorry, we don´t sell it”.

Shopping for clothes seems to be easier, and a lot more fun. I thought I wouldn´t find many clothes I´d like here, but boy was I wrong!! So many cool clothes in China, and everything´s so cheap! You have to haggle in pretty much every shop, and it´s really funny, because my Chinese is so bad that sometimes I´m just asking if this thing written on the label is the price, and they lower the price ´cause they think I´m haggling. Yeepee!

One thing about buying clothes though...try not to get too depressed when you realize that size “small” you used to wear in Europe turns out to be an XL in China. Women here are so thin! Everyone must refer to me as the “foreign cow”, I think I´ll look up the word cow in the dictionary, I´m pretty sure I´ve heard it behind my back.

MORE CHAPTERS TO COME:
PEOPLE
FOOD
FOREIGNERS IN CHINA
TOURISTING
TEACHING IN CHINA