Thursday, September 15, 2011

Same same, but different ...

It is always nice to start off with a serious part first before you jump into the informal jibber jabber, so I start with that small formal part:

You can go anywhere in the world, from Toronto to Sydney and from Taipei to Beijing, I chose the latter and you will find out why during the process of this blog. The thing is choosing a Western country like Canada or Australia is really easy, you know in general the language, the food and the way people will react in different situations. However it will not provide you the insights of a real different culture, with all of her beauty and rich history as for instance China does. It is not a coincidence that they ruled the world for a long time in history and that they are now on their way of doing such again.

In the last quarter of a century (so my whole life) their economy have been growing so tremendously (yes their population too), that they draw the attention of
people and companies from all world and that is exactly what I am experiencing right now. So many western people are here to learn about the Chinese language and their culture. By doing that you find that there are many, many, many differences too. Those start at the airport of Beijing when you ask for the way to the taxi’s. No one seems to speak any English and it looks like they don’t want to help you when you ask them. However what I found out later, is that (when they cannot speak English) they don’t want to help you because they don’t want to say “no”. In fact in Chinese language the word “no” does not even exist, they say:”not yes” instead of “no”. If they can speak English or they think they can help you, they are so tremendously polite.



The third day I was in Beijing I switched hotels, however the one I went to was full. So I walked around looking for a hotel, but could not find one anywhere. So two Chinese girls came up to me and asked if they could help me (because it looked like I could use some). So they brought me to three hotels, by taxi, paid for it and by doing that, spend 1,5 hours until I finally found a hotel!!! They did not accept anything in return, but only invited me to come with them to church on Sunday. They where Christians, which seems to have become the biggest religion in China. This readiness to help is extremely rare in our western culture. In fact before I came here I expected them to be more reserved, yet they are pretty open and eager to learn from your experiences and stories.

All of this is the reason why I am in Beijing, to get to know their culture, way of thinking, language and understanding of life. I am here now for over two weeks and I already saw a lot, met a lot of people and had some great experiences and stories. Of course there are a couple of other reasons too why I am here, but more of that in my next post. That one will be more focused on the way international students live their lives here …

1 comment:

  1. Hey, good to see you're having a good time in China! Technically, there is also no word for "yes", because that is "shi" which means "to be" if you translate it and "no" is "bu shi" which is "not to be" or just a negative form of "to be". Also, Christianity is by far not the biggest religion in China, the biggest religion would be Buddhism but that's still only about one third of the country I think, the rest does not have a pure religious belief like in the west. Good luck in China!

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