Interesting Cultural Findings (Part II)

The humidity continues to be oppressive and inescapable. Even my books have been affected by it because their pages are warping. I find that I have to drink a lot more water here because I’m sweating it off before it can get through my system for me to pee/tinkle it out.

Our packing list suggested that you pack lots of bug spray and anti-itch cream and they weren’t kidding. In my first day of being in Xiamen, I got two pretty good mosquito bites. I can usually tell when the mosquitos are biting me when they are in the middle of biting me, but not these. We call them “no-see-ums” because you don’t see them biting you! The bites also last a long time! I think I still have my bites and it’s been a week, and my classmates still have theirs from the week before I arrived. Consequently, we all wear bug spray like it’s perfume.

Here in China, the sun rises at 5:20 am and sets at 7:00 pm. It’s crazy early on both ends for the summer! I wake up with the sun that early! And did you know that all of China (which has a greater land mass than the USA) has only one time zone? Kind of crazy considering the contiguous/continental USA has four time zones.

Air travel is awesome in China. Mostly awesome. Let me tell you why. Yeah, maybe the flights are delayed (regularly), but everything else makes up for it. So far I’ve flown on airlines I’ve never heard of such as Hunan Airlines and DragonAir, but they are amazing! Their airport security doesn’t make you take your shoes off nor do you have to take your baggy of liquids out of your carry-on. And best of all, they serve meals on every flight even if the flight is less than an hour long, no extra charge.

Everyday we get a couple new rolls of toilet paper in our room. It has to be a couple rolls because the rolls they give us are seriously mini-rolls. I’m talking they maybe have a quarter of the paper on them when compared to the amount we have on our regular-sized rolls in the USA.