China Impressions

Visiting China after Japan gave us all a contrast in cultures and the ease of visiting the two countries.
Where the people of Japan are orderly, the people of China are chaotic.
The Japanese: wait in line, wait for traffic lights, are friendly.
The Chinese: push and shove to get to the front, jaywalk everywhere, either stare, ask for money, or say "hello" (and that's all the English they know).
The drivers in Japan obey traffic rules, and I never saw a car with a dent or one that was dirty.
The drivers in China constantly blow their horns for the right of way and weave in and out with no consideration for lanes. Pedestrians do not have the right of way, and you are likely to be hit in a crosswalk by any conveyance.
The (few) smokers in Japan only smoke in approved areas.
The smokers in China could support the U.S. tobacco industry, and they smoke everywhere, including restaurants.  Then they throw their butts on the ground.
The transportation system in Japan tries to accommodate English-speaking visitor with signage and people who speak a little English.
The Chinese public transportation system is hard to use with very few English signs and nowhere to get help.  The streets are marked with English names which is a huge help.
There are no trashcans in Tokyo, because everyone takes their trash with them.
There are a few trashcans in Shanghai, but most people just throw their trash on the ground.
People in Japan are quiet on trains but noisy in restaurants.
People in China are loud everywhere.

The parts of China that we visited had construction going on everywhere--mostly high-rise apartment buildings.  It's pretty amazing at the building going on.  In Shanghai, they are getting ready for a World's Fair, so they are ramped up to get everything finished.  As a result, a lot of sidewalks and streets are torn up.

These differences sound like the Chinese are rude, but these are just cultural differences that exist, and that's the way you have to look at them when you travel in other countries.  We might think it is "bad" because that's not the way we do things, but by taking away value judgments about whether something like "loudness" is good or bad, you get to observe that the Chinese are just a different culture.

Part of our pre-port talk was about telling us what to expect from the Chinese culture, and that helped a lot.  We knew that we would be accosted by sellers of "genuine" Rolex watches as soon as we walked out of the port.  So, we were able to view this from a spectator standpoint.  We knew that shop keepers would bargain, so we got to experience this phenomenon.  We did hope that more people would be able to speak English, but that was okay.  The merchants all had a big screen calculator that they used solely to type in the price of something to show you.

Some of us lost stuff in China.  I heard of lost jackets, coats, cameras, Blackberries and in my case a $1 glove.  In previous ports, taxi drivers went out of their way to return lost items.   In China, the tendency was more to help you lose something, especially in bars.  Overall, we all thought it was quite an interesting place, and with interesting people who struggle and hustle to get ahead.