Rena and Wade Around the World

Our first Round the World trip from Jan 2006 - July 2006.

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Location: Regina/Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

The adventures of living and working abroad. From Cayman to Europe, a break year and side adventure travels, this is our story.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Interesting Facts on China

Interesting Fact #1: China is Big.
Seriously, there are a lot of people in China. 1 out of every 5 people on this planet lives in China. That adds up to 1.3 billion. The largest city in Canada is Toronto with 4.5 million people. In China, there seems to be an endless number of massive cities. I was expecting there to be around 15million in each of Beijing and Shanghai, but who knew about all the others? Datong 2.7 million, Xi’an 6.6 million, Zhengzhou 6.2 million, Luoyang 6.3 million, Kaifeng 4.6 million, Wuhan 8.4 million, Yichang 4 million, Nanchang 4.1 million, Changsha 5.8 million, Yueyang 5.1 million, Hengyang 6.9 million, Huaihua 4.8 million. It just goes on and on and on. There are almost 100 cities with over 1 million people. In Canada there are 5 cities with over 1 million people.

Interesting Fact #2: Chinese people like to spit.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether you are walking through the streets, in a shopping mall, at a restaurant, or locked in a closet, about every 10 seconds you will hear someone hawking up what must be a baseball size cup of phlegm. Then they spit it wherever they happen to be standing. It’s a little unnerving at times, but so far we seem to have avoided being struck by any stray gobs. Knock on wood. I was thinking about it the other day, let’s say the average person hawks up a massive load only once per day (a very conservative estimate based on my observations so far) and that gob is about 5 ml in volume (also fairly conservative I think). With 1.3 billion people that is 6.5 million liters of phlegm being spit onto the ground every single day. The streets of China are no place to wear flip flops.

Interesting Fact #3: Mandarin is hard.
Not really a big surprise. The hardest part is not the sounds, but rather the tone. This is rather inhibiting to newcomers given that the tone of the same word can have vastly different meanings. To give you an appreciation, the word ma can be pronounced 4 different ways depending on whether it is a high tone, rising tone, falling-rising tone or falling tone. Thus it can mean mother, hemp, horse or swear. Could be an interesting conversation if you get mixed up.

1 Comments:

Blogger Kamis Khlopchyk said...

Wow that's a lot of people, GROSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS, and very confusing.

Makes me want to visit China, really!

I had heard about the spitting, but I wonder how does something so disgusting become culturally acceptable and what are the risks that could happen here.....

Flip flops may be on the way out in the fashion world!

9:25 AM  

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