Listicle Touring: 6 Amazing Things You Don't Know About Life in China That Will Literally Restore Your Faith in Humanity. What Happens Next Will Blow Your Mind. Hashtag.

Over the *mumble* kilometers that we traveled in China, we had the chance to encounter a fair number of crazy, kooky things in China that we hadn't expected.  And now, for your illumination, I present them to you in the traditional manner of my people: a numbered list.

1. Babies wear pants with a big ol' split in the crotch.

Note: this is not an original photo.  All credit to the original photographer, mostly
because I don't want to be known as the dude with all the photos of baby butts.

Yes, we'd heard of this before visiting China, but there was still something of a triple-take every time we saw these garments in action.  The usual emotional journey goes like this: disbelief, shock, disgust, curiosity, looking away because you don't really want to be watching a baby ding-dong.  Historically, these pants were used instead of diapers, which does kind of make some sense if you live in a country with a ton of outdoor space and not an abundance of clean things that can afford to get baby poop all over them.  Now that diapers are more common, you'll often see diapers worn under the split pants, which makes all kinds of sense.

In our experience, parents seem to be pretty on-the-ball about being respectful with baby poop.  This cute lil' guy with the mohawk, for instance?  We looked away to take some photos, and happened to look back just as the mom was holding him gingerly over a plastic bag (sorry, no photos of that).  The boy seemed to be taking it in stride.  I would have opted for the traditional "Dog Doo Technique" and put the bag inside-out over my hand.  Actually, knowing me, I would have probably fled the country instead.

2. People smoke cigarettes out of enormous bongs.

This one was a bit of a shock.  Old men (and only old men) assemble by the side of the road or in little restaurants throughout the day and stuff the filter end of their cigarette in the chamber and pull huge lungfuls of smoke out of the bong.  Sometimes they're made of elaborately carved bamboo or wood, but most of the time they're this sort of repurposed-tin-can material.  I assumed they were just huge pipes, but we saw waitresses pour liters of dirty water out of these things into the street (and onto our shoes).

Our only guess is that these bongs are so popular because, I've been told, Chinese cigarettes are nasty.  Even nasty by the standard of foul-smelling rolls of tar and cyanide.  So maybe they use these to...I don't know, make the smoking experience more pleasant?  I guess it must beat quitting.

3. Condoms are extremely plentiful.

Photo also not taken by me.  I'm not a creeper.

Walk into a pharmacy or supermarket in China and there's usually a giant wall of condoms.  This is notable mostly compared to our experiences in Korea and Japan, where condoms are usually very surreptitiously kept behind the counter or hidden away somewhere, and then usually only one or two boxes of local brands.  I guess Korea and Japan are both struggling with population decline, and...um...

...Is this insensitive?  I feel insensitive for bringing this up.  Let's move on.

4. Everybody wants a photo with us!

Basically everywhere we went, whenever we had even the slightest interaction with someone in Yunnan province, when we finished up they asked if they could take a photo.  Shopkeepers, hotel staff, waitresses, random pedestrians, everybody wanted a piece of us.  Sometimes they wanted to be in the photo with us, sometimes they just wanted us...standing there awkwardly (well, I'm not sure if that's what they wanted, but that's what they generally got).  This guy poured me a beer and tried very, very hard to communicate with me while I was waiting for my dinner.  We're best friends now.

This guy just happened to be around, I think.

We always heard that foreigners traveling in this part of the world got a lot of attention from the locals.  And sure, we occasionally hear people mutter the word laowai as we walk past (the equivalent of gaijin in Chinese, and also one of about four Chinese words we understand).  But the attention all seemed to be pretty positive, as far as we could tell.  People wanted to talk, they wanted to know something about us, but mostly they just wanted a record of us being there.  Can't say I understand what they would do with these pictures -- "Hey, remember that guy I met for thirty seconds, the one I couldn't talk to or understand?" -- but it's nice to be celebrities all the same.  We're trying to enjoy it before going back to looking like everyone else (but far more attractive).

5. They sure eat a lot of bread in China.

Photo also not mine.  No bread has ever lasted long enough around me for anyone to get their camera out.

We assumed that, like Japan and Korea, the diet in China would be generally rice-based.  But while we were in Qingdao and Beijing, everyone sure seemed to be eating and selling a whole lotta bread.  Flatbread, fry bread, onion bread, cheese bread, rice bread, rye bread.  Bread bread bread.  Bread.  Bread is a funny word, isn't it?  I forget where I was going with this.

6. There's three-wheeled cars everywhere!

Yes!  Just like Mister Bean!

Actually, a lot of them seemed to be three-wheeled motorcycles (some kind of...tri-motorcycle) that confusingly had the shell of a car installed over it.  Whee!

Chinese Whispers

I never really cared about going to China.  For the last half-decade or so that we've been planning this trip, my head has always been filled with images of sweltering jungles and banana pancakes.  Lao, Thailand, Cambodia, those are the places that stir the imagination.  China, on the other hand, brings darker things to mind: open sewers, dirty streets, contaminated food, crushing mobs of strangers who spat and smoked and shouted, toxic clouds of pollution, an oppressive government spying on its citizens or disappearing them in unmarked vans.  These ideas come from the American media, from friends who've spent time in China, or from my own frantic imagination, and even though I knew they were probably of limited veracity, they hung over my head as our ferry pulled into Qingdao port.  Years in Japan had intensified my already timid nature; I feel like crying when someone cuts in line in front of me, how the heck was I going to cope in China?

Over the next four weeks, though, I found myself proven wrong in the best possible way.  The people we met were friendly, welcoming, and chatty (even when we didn't understand a word that was being said).

The food was abundant, easy to order, cheap, safe to eat, and damn delicious.

Except for the scorpions, of course.

The scenery was absolutely breathtaking.  Especially where we did all of our cycling, Yunnan province, which means "South of the clouds."

And the cycling, most importantly, was top-notch.  Mountainous, sure, and therefore exceedingly difficult.  We were unable to keep up our usual molasses-on-a-cold-day pace what with all the 20-kilometer climbs, and so we had to cut our visit short to get out of the country before our visas expired.  But if we had had another 30 days, we would have spent every one happily pushing up those mountains and taking photos of clouds.

The road leaving Kunming is lined with these solar- and wind-powered streetlights.  On a windy day like this, the turbines hum like cicadas. 

Unfortunately, China's nice modern roads are the product of constant construction, which leaves day-long patches of road that are nonstop mud puddles or dusty pothole fields.

 

Of course, not everything about China is perfect.  Beijing was a good city to be a tourist -- easily navigable by bike or foot, plenty of English, lots to see and do -- but the pollution was so unbelievably thick every day we were there.  It was so bad that skyscrapers a block away were all but invisible and the sun looked like it was coming through smoked glass.  In a way, Beijing felt like being in the future.  The dystopian future, y'know, where the earth is too far gone to save and all we can do is cough and squint and hope that it doesn't go completely kaput until we're already dead.  Leaving the city for the countryside was a relief, but we haven't forgotten how awful it felt to be somewhere so polluted, and I hope we never do.

And we did find the pushing, rude, anarchic China that we'd head so many horror stories about.  In fact, we lived it for one brief afternoon.  On our trip to visit the Great Wall, which is only a short train ride away from Beijing, we made it to the train station an hour early for our return to the city to find the station completely mobbed.  We took our place in line and scoffed at the bent-backed grandmothers and young spiky-haired dudes trying to muscle past us.  "Where do they think they're going?" we asked each other quietly, unable to believe that someone would be so rude in order to get on the train 5 seconds faster.

As time ticked closer to departure, though, the station swelled with more and more passengers desperate to get a spot on the next train, which was also the final train of the day.  Miles from the city, none of us could afford to be stranded out here overnight.  Hundreds packed into the hallway, and it grew more doubtful that there would be room on the train for all of us, much less room to sit down.  After an hour of waiting, all thousand of our knees began to ache and we all knew that we needed to get on that train.  Uniformed officials shuffled around uselessly, occasionally making announcements far too quiet to be heeded (also they were in Chinese).

When the gate to the platform opened at last, civilization collapsed.  We all broke into a run.  Elbows out, backpack clutched to my chest, I sprang between mothers and their children, headbutted my way past old men with canes and young women in high heels.  A hand grabbed my shoulder, pulling me back, but I shook it off and sprinted to the end of the platform were there were already a dozen people waiting.  The train pulled up and hundreds of eyes stared at that door hungrily, all breathing that we would kick our own mother in the shin to get a spot on that train (sorry, Mom), so tired were we of waiting and so desperate to get away from this awful place.

In the end, we did make it on the train.  As far as I know, no passenger was left in a bloody heap at the station.  Somehow, Jenn and I even got seats.  We stared out the window into the smog, breathless and dry-mouthed, and we wondered if the price of getting our seats was worth the spiritual toll we paid.  All it took was a little bit of discomfort and a little bit of fear to turn two friendly, sensitive hippies into crazed animals who were perfectly ready to murder the crap out of Piggy if that's what it took.  If this is what train travel in China was like, if this sort of unmediated competition for limited resources was a regular situation to be in, then that must really make it hard for the people who live here to be nice people.

As bad as we felt, we still kept our seats.  I don't know how many orphans or limbless veterans had to stand up for another two hours, and I didn't want to know.

I don't know why China has such a terrible reputation in the West.  I think a fair amount of it stems from good old-fashioned racism; hell, Chinese people have been distrusted or outright reviled in the US for a couple hundred years.  There's also a healthy dose of distrusting the other major world superpower.  I mean, there are more Mandarin speakers than English speakers in the world, and that's scary as hell to a place where few dare utter that USA does not equal #1.  I guess the biggest reason there's such a negative image of China, though, is just basic media scare-mongering: people will watch a news program about a big bad empire of not-white people who oppress their citizens and hate our capitalist freedoms.  Programs about diverse, complicated places don't really make it to air.  And I don't mean to say that China's without problems (because that would be a dumb doo-doo-headed thing to say), just that it's really easy to assume from watching the news that America is nothing but school shootings, state-sponsored executions, and McDonalds, and that's just as ignorant a caricature as thinking that China is nothing but jack-booted authoritarianism and poison toothpaste (and pandas).

So I guess the lesson here is: don't trust the media (sorry again, Mom).

The other, probably more relevant lesson?  China's an awesome place to tour, and we're sure as hell coming back someday.