eep!! My the first day in china.
I feel like such a Chinese tourist in australia, exept that im an Australian tourist in china. on the train ride in from the airport i took about 15 photos of every sky-scrapper i saw.
so my first impressions of china?
people arn't starring at me! i was so expecting to be stared at here! (like in finland when i first went to school, or walked down the street practicing my "r's" out loud to my self), but everyone just seems to power ahead ignoring everyone around them. so far the only person who I've noticed looking at me was the some white guy trying to cruise me in the lobby when i got home tonight. stupido gringos!! vittun americalaiset! (can somone tell me the mandarin/cantonese??)
oh, and in Hong Kong the pedestrians own the streets; we walk blindly into the road expecting that a car just won't be there; and for the most part they arn't. The streets are actually quite empty, and as a pedestrian one can quite easily walk constantly as there always seems to be green lights at intersections.
Also, everything is really small. the esculators, the rooms, the windows the showers and the people!! i think my dad is enjoying feeling normal sized for once though.
and its kinda cheep if you know where to go i think. me and dad got coffee for the both of us for AU$9 and sat and talked for several hours, but then got dinner for the both of us for AU$4.
hope your all managing to somehow live with out me,
zaijian Lucas
Chinese people are probably now used to the idea of westerner's in their country. Much like the way Australia is used to asians. TBH lucas you're not that remarkable from a normal asian POV (sorry, but its true :P) as for the roads, yeah there is a place that i've heard people just step off the sidewalk into the traffic and the cars have to go around them. Probably not completely true and i seriously advise you don't do it because you never know if it might be a person who will stare at you and in the process mow you over due to being captivated and all (lol)
ReplyDeleteas for the smallness, you'll find that a lot in china, mostly because you're very large by comparisson (for when most of this stuff was made anyway)
Cheep food is always good, beware though in beijing the style of cooking is heavy on its use of oil. if you're not careful you'll come back a bit heavier than you used to be :P
and for today's chinese lesson:
foreigners are refered to as gui lao [with tones gu(/)i la(v)o - i hope you understand that, because thats what i'll be doing until i figure out how to write accents with my keyboard] or more commonly and slightly more derrogatorily, da bi zi gui lao [with tones da(\) bi(/) zi(\) gu(/)i la(v)o]
the simplistic translation is big nosed foreigner (some people translate it as devil, but i'm not too sure)
also some times the term lao wai [with tones la(v)o wa(\)i].
Both seem quite racist to me but its the terminology that is used in china, you can either get offended or get used to it coz it aint gonna change.
Also are you using the book i gave you?