While you are eating, everything is permitted. Except touching the food. If you have to touch it, you are well advised to first slip plastic gloves over your hands.
Handkerchiefs will be brought to your table in classy wrappings. After your meal, the table will look like a battlefield. All waste is simply left where it falls. And since in China, many dishes are served ”complete“, for instance the chicken with its head and claws or the entire fish, you can easily imagine what is left after the meal.
Alcohol is also one of those topics. They have the well-loved (and dangerous) “Chinese Wine”. Except it is not wine. It is high-strength schnapps. It is drunk out of not really small glasses and contributes mightily.
I have seldom again and again met people as drunk as here in China in a German business hotel (except maybe at Oktoberfest time). The (sober) Chinese, for instance in the lift, however, always react quite tactfully: they look at each other in a humorous, rather than worried or anxious, way and unobtrusively smile about the alcohol victims.
What I do not like very much is the smog. Almost all the time, it spreads inversely over the cities and also the surrounding countryside. And if you see all those gigantic skyscrapers, streets, railway stations and industrial buildings, you can easily imagine how this country thirsts for electric energy.
In China, a considerable part of the electric energy is produced with coal, probably mostly brown coal. I heard that currently a new big coal power station starts producing for the electric network each day. If you also take all those cars and trucks into consideration, you will no longer be surprised at me telling you that I only ever once saw the sun in its usual splendour in China.
All places are overflowing with people. Life happens in public. They sit, eat, talk, play, do gymnastics. In parks or pedestrians‘ zones, the people dance in small groups to the music they brought in their miniature audio devices, or else in larger groups to the music provided by all those loudspeakers.
And people often stand at attention in China. All kinds of groups, both military and civilian, frequently stand at attention for saluting. It might be the night shift of a restaurant when they are sworn to their duties or the service persons in a museum.
When on an outing, older people follow their leader beautifully in rows of two, if the group is large even in rows of four. Mind you, we are talking a precision that no German Kindergarten could nowadays manage.
At all times, everything seems to be moving. It is like a huge, non-stop human flow that seems to be drowning in the big chaos.
Well, that is it on my impressions. I could write a lot more about specialties, but I decided to let this suffice.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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