Chinese Retail
Chinese retail scares me. Specifically, chinese women's fashion stores.

They scare me because store designers seem to believe there is a direct correlation between the quantity of mannequins in their store and the quality of their merchandise. As a result, most women's clothing stores have row after row of mannequins, laid out like soldiers in battle formation. Walking through a store is like some horrific Stephen King nightmare.

Worse, these aren't your average mannequins. They are tall, stern women, vaguely western, with greenish skin, short molded hair, and dark black eye brows. They are all exactly the same. Same tilt of the head. Same awkward pose. Row after row after row, in every store, in every city, in every province of China.

And whoever the aging communist hack in charge of the mannequin factory is, he clearly has a sort of 50's housewife fetish, because all of the mannequins have giant cone-shaped breasts that stick straight out at you, threateningly.

Toothpicks
A chinese guy will squat in a public toilet right next to you without a divider, he'll pick his nose while serving you dinner, he'll hawk and spit while his on a first date, he'll slurp noodles louder than a kid blowing bubbles through a straw, but when it comes to using a toothpick (which everyone does after every meal) he will always gingerly cover his mouth with his left hand while he toothpicks away with his right. Where this single instance of modesty comes from, I have no idea.

Chinese Tour Group
These words should strike fear in the hearts of small children. Run for cover! They've already taken over the remote corners of China and soon they'll tackle the rest of the earth!

Kleenex and TP
For the country that invented paper, they sure don't like to give it away. TP is available for sale everywhere, but it isn't provided in public bathrooms. And napkins? Good luck. If you are lucky enough to be given a napkin, it will be thinner than one-ply toilet paper and about 2 inches square. Sarah and I have taken to hoarding napkins. It was a big deal last night when the waitress didn't clear the extra place-setting at our table and we were able to sneak out with an extra one for our stash.

Small Bills
Change is a hard thing to come by in China. Banks give you 100's, but any time you try to buy something with a bill larger than a 10 they look at you like you still have ink from the forgery machine on your fingers. And if they eventually accept your bill, they never have change. With a surprised look, as if they've never been presented with this scenario before, they rummage around in their pockets, look in drawers, and often run next door to see if the their neighbor has some change.

Hotel Lobbies
A week ago, I would have told any prospective traveler to China never to judge a hotel by its lobby. Even grotty nasty 2-star hotels have gorgeous lobbies filled with polished granite and marble, chrome and brass. More than once we have walked into a gleaming lobby and made the mistake of getting our hopes up. Then we go to our room and find stained wallpaper and a dirty bathroom. Never judge a hotel by its lobby.

But now, with the wisdom of 3 weeks in China, I've cracked the code. It's all about the clocks.

You see, every hotel in China has 6 or 7 clocks behind the front desk, supposedly showing the times for cities around the world. This is supposed to impress upon you their professionalism and worldliness. Usually it has the opposite effect, because the clocks are never set correctly and the cities are mis-spelled.

So, without further ado, here's the secret code to determining the true quality of the hotel from its lobby:

• 1-star hotel: No clocks.
• 2-star hotel: Clocks set to random times, cities misspelled.
• 3-star hotel: Clocks set to random times, cities spelled correctly.
• 4-star hotel: Local time correct, all others random.
• 5-star hotel: At least 2 of 7 clocks set correctly.

Arnold
One of the first sights I saw in China was Arnold Schwarzenagger's smiling face, plastered on a billboard just outside the Beijing airport. This same picture is everywhere in China. Arnold has tight leather pants, gleaming white teeth, and he's holding a cell phone or radio or something out at you. It's on newspapers, posters at bus stops, magazines.

Spitting
It's common knowledge that the Chinese like to spit. Everyone I talked to that had been to China mentioned the spitting and I thought I was prepared. I pictured spittle covering train car floors and city sidewalks slippery with phlegm. Really, though, the spitting itself isn't too bad. A few years ago, the government launched a campaign to curtail indoor spitting and that seems to have worked.

What's spine-tingling, though, is the operatic hack that preceeds the spit. This is much, much worse than I anticipated and is impossible to ignore. People in China spend a tremendous amount of energy trying to summon up every last drop of their internal bodily fluids and then expelling them through the mouth. You hear deep, thick "harrawacks" from the daintiest of girls. Businessmen in spotless black suits hawk in short staccato bursts. Old women pull up big bosomy mouthfuls.

And the unintended side effect of the government's campaign is that when inside you have to watch the hawker lunge around with a big mouthful of muck, looking for a garbage to spit into. Nasty.

"Hello"
I'm convinced Chinese newborns come out of the womb screaming "hello" rather than crying. Everyone here knows the word and uses it with abandon.

Mostly, people just shout it out at you as you walk down the street. Little kids, especially, like to say it (and they always giggle afterwards). Some run up to you and say it, others try to sneak a quiet one in as you walk by. It's not just the kids, either. Young and old, they just want to say hello.

When I say everyone in China knows the word, I mean that they know how to say it, not neccessarily what it means. "Hello" is their catch-all word for talking about anything to any Westerner. You can have an entire conversation with a vendor and he'll use nothing but the word hello. Hello means "Do you want a taxi," hello means "Come look at this," hello means, "How about this item, then," hello means "goodbye." And sometimes, everyone once in a while, hello means "Hello".

Customer Service
Customer service staff in China care neither about the customer nor about good service. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Waiting in Line
The no. 1 absolute biggest baddest worst most annoying thing about traveling in China is waiting or line. Or rather, the lack of waiting in line. You see, the chinese have no concept of an orderly queue. When waiting in line for tickets, the only "rule" is who gets their sweaty fistful of cash shoved into the ticket window first.

In a crowd, I actually don't mind it all that much. Everyone is pushing and shoving. It's every man for himself. There's some strange kind of order in that.

What's really infuriorating is when there are only one or two people in line. The first time we took the subway, I walked up to the ticket window where one other customer was purchasing a ticket. I was the only other guy around. I stood a few inches back letting him finish his transaction. Just as he was finishing, another guy walked up, elbowed in front of me, and shoved his hand in the window for a ticket. It was the first time this had happened to me without a crowd and I couldn't believe it. It's not like there could be any confusion about who was there first, what my intention of standing there was, or any danger of his not getting a ticket 30 seconds later.

Sadly, it's happened many times since. Bus stations, grocery stores, boarding a plane. The crowds I've gotten used to, but this one-on-one discourtesy I don't think I'll ever get past. It's worst than the noise. It's worse than the litter. And, yes, it's even worse than Chinese toilets.

Christmas Carols
Christmas carols and decorations show up all over China. We entered a restaurant one blazing afternoon and lunched to a catchy muzak version of "Let It Snow." Little children's wind-up toys play "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." We stopped for a tea at a small place that had an elaborate "Merry Christmas" sign painted on the window, complete with Christmas trees, Santa Claus, and elves. No problem for me, though. I'll take "Silent Night" over screeching chinese pop music any time.

Giving Way
Disembarking an elevator is a curious thing in China. Common sense tells you that it's easier for everyone involved if those waiting to get onto the elevator let those inside the elevator get off first.

Not so, you silly American!

A chinese person boarding an elevator (or bus, or train, or . . .) considers it of the utmost importance that they spring for the door the second it opens, like a running back into a defensive line. So you're standing there on a jam-packed elevator, slowly descending to the ground floor. You jerk to a stop. That little sounds chimes. The door open.

Chaos.

People no the elevator are pushing and shoving to get out. A little old lady who wants on has her shoulder down and is wedging her way into the thick of things. At first this bothered me. now I find it kind of funny. And besides, I'm bigger than most of 'em so I just pretend I'm Refrigerator Perry heading for the end zone.

Volume
You know how annoying it is when you're having a nice quiet dinner, sipping a glass of wine by candlelight after a long week, and suddenly the guy at the table next to starts yelling into his cell phone like he's the only guy in the room? That's kind of like China, all the time.

People talk loudly, early or late, without any regard for the little details like the sleeping patterns of those around them. Conversations always sound sharp and accusatory. Trains blare loud announcements over speakers. Stores blast music at full volume. Megaphones are everywhere and used far too liberally. Karaoke screeches into the night.

You learn to tune out most of it, but what really gets me is in temples or monasteries. Westerners tend to naturally fall into a kind of contemplative hush when they enter a cathedral or gorgeous natural setting, but here there is no such compulsion. Nothing's worse than sitting in a nice quiet temple, looking at the elaborate decorations and smelling the incense, watching the monks do their monk-things, and then a loud, yelling, picture-taking, screaming mob of Chinese tourists enter the room and ruin the experience.

Clean or Not?
I can't decide if China is one of the cleanest countries in the world or one of the dirtiest. People litter and spit everywhere, but an army of old ladies is constantly sweeping and polishing and dusting. Even some of the dreaded public bathrooms -- which reek like you wouldn't believe -- are kept relatively clean by the bathroom attendants. Maybe people litter so much because they know people are picking up after them, and the people keep picking up because there's so much litter.

The place it's really sad is when you get out of the city and see the endless stream of refuse along the roads and trails and in the rivers. Here, the people keep on flinging their garbage wherever they wish, but there's no one to pick up after them.

Fishtanks
What's with all the empty decorative fishtanks in the lobbies of restaurants? China looks like a dentist's lobby after a severe drought.

I'm Still in China?
Our first night in China we had dinner in a small restaurant a short ways from Tiananmen Square. It was a dingy little place, but it could have been any chinese restaurant in San Francisco, Seattle, or even Minneapolis for that matter. We finished our dinner, paid our bill, and stepped outside. This is hard to explain, but as we stepped into the street I was shocked and surprised to find myself still in China! Every other time in my life that I'd stepped out of a chinese restaurant I'd stepped back into Lower Queen Anne, Seattle, or Richfield, Minnesota, or wherever.