Like this:

I feel as though whenever I post cultural differences in China that I’m pretty much a Debbie Downer, but I don’t want to give the impression that I hate this place or its people. I try to approach these differences with an open mind and take into account the history of the country and the enormous changes the people here have been through in the past century. That really helps put things into perspective for me.

China is still a third world country. I don’t care what anyone else says or how much money the government will pour into trying to mask this fact here – they are not a fully developed civilization. They try to make their streets modern, build extremely fancy buildings even bring in vast numbers of foreign businessmen to try to improve their image. However, the infrastructure of this country is still way behind that of a modern country’s

I saw the perfect analogy today. We were walking back from the bus stop and not 100 feet away from the bus was a man in a business suit. He was facing a brick wall taking a piss. At noon. That man IS China. China pays money to buy a nice suit and then pees on a wall in public. They have nice buildings, foreign businessmen, and gigantic shopping malls. But babies still wear onesies that have slits in the butt so they can squat and take a crap on the sidewalk, grown men urinate wherever seems best to them, road crews lay a new road only to tear it up a week later because of some flaw that I can’t discern, and the best of all is the fact that doorknob technology still seems to be beyond the grasp of many here.

I think China got caught in this storm of modernization and pressure was put on them to try to reach certain standards, produce certain levels of output to meet the needs of the over 1.5 billion people here, and most of all the need for an image to appear to the rest of the world that they are civilized. The government is too ass-backward to fool me though, I can see through their clever disguise. My head is so full of opinions and thought processes that are trying to sort out everything I’ve seen and experienced so far that I think writing it all down for you to understand is just hopeless. If you really want to know let’s go out for a beer in July and I’ll tell you all I can think of.

So doorknobs. Apparently they’re hard. The cafeteria on the first floor of our apartment building has a set of double doors with what I’m willing to admit are slightly redundant door handles. There are long, vertical handles on each door with the word push (from the inside) in both English in Chinese. Below the handles are doorknobs so they can lock the place up at night. Most Chinese doors don’t use doorknobs I have to point out, from what I can tell they use a locking mechanism on almost all their doors. Essentially you unlock your door and then pull or push open without turning a knob. So you can see how there might be issues at the cafeteria. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been amused watching people trying to leave that don’t reach for the knob, they just push the handles. Then, instead of logically trying to solve the problem, they just push harder. Then they push harder and rock the door back and forth. I’m pretty sure they would break the door open before utilizing the doorknob if it wasn’t for the lady who sells lunch tickets who gets up and shows them how to do it.

Next weekend we’re headed for Qingdao, a fun mix of Bavarian and Chinese culture. Follow the link for some more info and pictures!

Until next time (I’ll update myself more frequently, I promise!),

- Andrew

OH! New photos made it up to Flickr apparently. Check ‘em out, but I can’t say they’re extremely exciting, just the last of the batch I’m going to upload from 2009. More to come!