You know you're in China...

Let me say this. This following post is 100% plagiarized from a foreign teacher that was stationed at our school a couple years ago. However, it was FAR too clever, and DEAD ON for me to pass up showing to everyone back home. The words belong to Diana Dove, whom I've never actually met, but I'm trying to get a hold of. Her old blog: "Inner Mongolian Brog"

I tweaked a few of these, and omitted a couple, and added a couple to more fit our slightly different (emphasis on slightly) experience over here in Tongliao. Please. Enjoy. And learn about our lives.

You might be in China if...

• you forget what clean smells like.
• you barely flinch when you see a small child emptying his bowels in the street.
• a cup of coffee costs more than ten times a bottle of beer.
• you spend less than 5RMB on a fully satisfying lunch, but might end up eating at a table with 4 strangers.
• you carry a supply of TP with you everywhere you go.
• you know how to use a squatter.
• you know what a squatter is.
• grown men and women often say hello to you, and when you reply they run away giggling.
• you can't decide if you love or hate the country you're living in.
• you see nothing wrong with standing on a white stripe in the middle of a highway while cars whiz past you at 90kph.
• it seems completely normal that some guy on a tricycle wants to buy your garbage.
• you don't blink an eye when a complete stranger wants to take a photo of you with his family.
• you use Kleenex for table napkins.
• you drink warm sodas and find them refreshing.
• you buy a movie that hasn't been released theatrically yet at home...
• when you can get ANYTHING to eat on a stick.
• when you are constantly asked if you think simple foods and beverages are delicious. "This is the best boiled water ever!" "fantastic seeds!"
• you take it in stride when you are offered beer/baijiu at lunch before going back to work.
• you can play charades so well that it is often not necessary to talk (due to lack of chinese when you arrive)
• an entire class looks at you with a blank face when you ask them to try and discover something on their own, rather than you just telling them the answer.
• you make a scheduled trip to KFC weekly to pretend like you're in America.
  
• you have learned to enjoy being stared at.
• almost anything can be "fixed"
• you teach your body to accept 'Nescafe instant coffee packs' as real coffee, when you know that it's not.
  
• when you go shopping for clothes or shoes you often find that they don't have what you want in a size that will fit your big foreign frame. Instead they offer you something bigger and uglier and think it's a fair compromise.
• you have ten different responses to the question, "Do you like China?"
• you point out foreigners to your Chinese friends even though you're foreign yourself.
• SARS doesn't worry you; 4% chance of death is considerably lower than eating the food, breathing the air, riding a bicycle or listening to bad KTV.
• you don't have any idea what something is, but you'll eat it anyway.
• if you just ate and liked it, you don't ask what it is.
• you completely ignore most people who say hello to you.
• you see a woman with dyed hair and try to figure out of she's Chinese or foreign by walking fast to catch up.
• you know what it is and you eat it anyway.
• you convince yourself that it doesn't matter how dirty the cooks' hands are, cooking will fix it.
• you are becoming proficient in 4 other languages: Mandarin, local dialect, Chinglish, and gibberish.
• if there are only 4 screaming children running around the classroom, you consider it a good primary class.
• if you're only mocked in public 4 times, you consider it a good day.
• you love tofu because there's nothing to spit out and it doesn't have any taste.
• you know exactly what CS is. (Diana's note: CS is Counter Strike - the dumbest computer game every teenage boy here is obsessed with)
• smoking does less harm to your lungs than breathing.
• you call polluted water and preservatives wine.
• living in a 'clean' city means living in one where you won't mutate. At least not immediately.
• you point over your back with your thumb when using the past tense.
• you've learned that it's okay to be 3 days/weeks late for appointments because everyone else is.
• every village is different from the rest of China but all foreigners are the same.
• everyone wants to be your friend - all you have to do is teach them English for free.
• everyone wants to teach you Chinese by speaking to you in English.
• you tell people you don't understand, so they write it for you - in Chinese.
• you love and hate children at the same time. (Amen. - Ricky)
  
• you walk into a bar on Friday night at 11.00pm and you are the only one there.
• you start thinking instant coffee tastes pretty good.
• no one cares if you wear the same clothes all month.
• absolutely everything that can possibly be eaten is in some way good for your health.
• KTV becomes interesting.
• warm beer becomes drinkable.
• apples are the size of pumpkins.
• only five minutes of prep time for a unannounced class no longer fazes you.
• you actually believe you're here to teach English.
• you plan to ask students questions they must form their own answers to and you bring reading material along to occupy your time during the long silence that fills the period between you asking the question and the first hand that tenatively rises.
• you no longer expect the truth.

From me:

• you expect to be a dignitary at any Chinese sponsored event you attend.
• when someone unexpected or unknown comes your way, your first reaction is to calm everyone down by saying, "We can just call Gaowei."
• your new favorite phrase to tell friends when saying goodbye is 'oh, hey, happy everyday!'
• you consider the covered rice restaurant owner's baby a part of your family.
• you eat on snack street's 'noodle place' often enough to say, "Oh hey - there's more peanuts in the soup today! Yes!"
• you say 'dui' to anything a local asks you because it is your go-to Mandarin response. (Dui means 'correct').
• you've attempted to teach every class that the word 'movie' is actually prounounced the way it is spelled, rather than 'MOOOIEE", and have slapped your forehead every time you walk into class and they say the same damn thing over and over.
• when going out to dinner, going to KTV, or going to the one western bar in town have become your singular trifecta of evening choices every weekend.
• you begin saying 'hallloooo' exactly like your students, unconsciously, in response to your students' saying 'halllloooo' to you.
• if making rice for breakfast isn't 'a big deal'.
• if every mid-way to expensive store you walk by has music blaring so loudly (outside and in) that you immediately think it is a disco, but are mystified to learn that it sells leathers jackets.

More to come, I'm quite sure.
-Ricky