Hilarious Cultural Differences

As we have no meal plan (and, indeed, no kitchen with which to make food), we pretty much have to dine out around twice a day. Luckily, due to Chinese artificial currency devaluation, this typically costs between $0.50 and $3, depending on whether it is street food or a sit-down meal (the former being fast and delicious but at a greater risk of "la duzi," or "spicy stomach," afterwards).

After touring numerous restaurants, a few patterns emerge. First, the staring. Chinese people have little concept of personal space, physically or visually, and a group of Americans eating (be it quietly or raucously) often attracts gaping mouths and wide eyes. One recent night we sat at an outdoor patio and ate as a middle-aged man walked up to us and stood, 5 feet away, staring at us and grinning for 3-5 minutes. Second, because the majority of the menus are still illegible to us (one can usually pick out that such-and-such meal is somehow composed of, say, beef, though today we discovered a way-too-weird dish that tasted of barbecued beef and burnt coffee), even though we ask the restaurant owners or waiters what's good, they never tell us. Time after time, we ask what dish or dishes are their favorite, and time after time they say "I don't have a favorite dish" or "it's not on the menu," and attempt to avoid the question as much as they can. We find this very odd and vaguely troubling.

On a side note, while walking home last night a toothless old man approached us and asked us what country we were from. Upon learning we were American, he grinned broadly and gave us a thumbs-up, said he hated the Japanese, and thoroughly thanked us for "pounding them into the ground" while making violent downward-pointed punching motions.

The media below are from yesterday's bicycle shopping. Once one leaves campus one quickly finds that Nanjing is, as one of my classmates put it, "perpetual downtown." Note that every stop light has a countdown timer to better tempt motorists to run down pedestrians.