The weather (unusually) has been getting slightly warmer as we head further into winter.. or perhaps we are just better prepared when we head out now! Although it is cold, it hasn't rained (or snowed) and the air remains very dry. It is one of the warmer winters ever recorded in Beijing, but in saying that it was -6C this morning at 10am. There is still some danger in this warm winter, as some days small puddles of ice form from a leaking car exhaust or a massive spit glob someone hacked up. If your not careful you can fall on one glob while trying to dodge another, or slip while running across the road (yes to avoid the crazy drivers texing on their phones). Over the last few weeks the pollution has been pretty bad. It only usually lasts for two days until a freezing northerly wind rips over the city but it smells (like burnt rubber car tires) and you can hardly see a thing. We keep our masks on!
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Eating half a loaf of bread filled with ice-cream and
fruit at Joy City Shopping Mall |
We have been having a fabulously difficult time negotiating the language, and have landed ourselves in quite a few awkward situations (what? Your saying I ordered the duck head?... I thought it was chicken leg.. damn). But in general our Chinese is improving very quickly and at times people can even get the jist of what we are trying to say. If that fails, Kara is pretty clever at waving her arms, hands, head or other body parts around in an explanation.
We have ended up with some very interesting dishes (one lunch Kara got a container of just grated cooked plain potato which was not quite the rice and eggplant she thought she as getting). So it has prompted us to learn to read some of the basic food items on a menu. We have now mastered quite a few Chinese characters, but with over 10,000 in the language, and new ones released every year we still have a long way to go!
To date, we have chicken, beef, pork, noodle, rice and fish down pack, but carry around about 20 different yellow post-it notes everywhere. However, since our up skilling we have been eating some very delicious dishes! The sweet and sour chicken is great as with the local hot pots.
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| Birthday boy! Celebrating with Strawberry cheesecake :) |
Aside from the language one of the more difficult aspects of living in China is the Chinese culture.
In China there is a concept of 'face'. You can lose face and you can gain face, you can take face away and you can give face. It's very difficult to compare to a western concept because there are so many unspoken rules. But for example, if you give a compliment to an individual in front of other people, you are giving someone face, but they only gain the face if they humbly decline or disagree with your compliment.
We can't really figure out how it works in other situations, because it doesn't seem to translate into Chinese road rules or to the way people scream at each in close confide spaces?
Because of China's communist past there are also very subtle differences in behaviour. People avoid being different, sticking out in any way and more often than not do not like to voice or share their opinion. They would never ever also talk to you about a problem (to save face). If they asked you for an eggplant lunch dish but you got the order wrong on the lunch run and bought pork back, a Chinese person would never say 'Hey this is not what I wanted!' rather they would start talking about something random like the chair layout in the office, hoping you would figure it out.... yip..... In the work environment this can be both difficult and at times quite beneficial (well just for humour of course)!.
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| The busy road home |
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| Buddy... theres a hole in your pants? |
We have also noticed that children's clothing is also quite interesting in China (like so interesting that its not appropriate to post photos). Its not uncommon for kids to wear pants with no crutch- purely for easy toilet access. The child can keep their pants on squat over the toilet and finish their business pronto. Nice. Or if they can't make it to the toilet they could use the shopping mall pot plant or pee in the bottle their mother holds in front of them- yes we have seen this happen.
For now we are getting very excited about the Chinese New Year, the fireworks and the hordes of dumplings that will be available! We will be jet setting down to Shanghai for the week and look forward to sharing our adventure soon!
Tot siens,
John and Kara
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