September 06
China Diaries Part I
6 months and 1 day into china, unbelievably i'm still alive.
The pre-china beliefs about the dirties toilets, spitting men, cows on the streets, bicycles instead of cars....well i realised some are just half-baked truths.
China is still an amazing country and it never ceases to amaze, the people, the culture, the scenes, the history...
But sometimes enough is enough....the longing for some solid hokkien mee and chai tow kuay is beginning to kick in....the constant chinese chatterings (gasp! worse...shanghainese chattering) is seriously beginning to bug me, i can't even order a burger at macdonald's in english...which explains why i have to pen this down in english.
The idea of queuing does not really exist in these people's mind, it gets bothersome when your polite singaporean attitude kicks in...which on the flipside can be read as inability to fight for what you want. On this side of the world, it's the survival of the fittest, as it has always been for the past 100 over years.
In a way, China really lets you see the best and worst of yourself, i don't hate it and i don't hate it...but i appreciate my time of growth and learning here. People come to this country with expecations and the elitist idea that they are better and smarter than the comrades here, unfortunately this myopic vision would only limit the vast amount of experience and knowledge you can otherwise learn here. The chinese have much to learn indeed, but honestly so do the rest of us.
This is a land of temptation becuase of its abundance, the shopping, the travel, the food, the women...
I still want to climb the highest peaks here, cross the vast greenlands, meet the president...but for now i want to go home. To a place where drivers on the road have the restrain to not sound their horns at every vehicle that crosses them, and back to my hokkien mee.
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