Rapid fire of the most amusing things I saw in China

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I just traveled there for 2 weeks:

  • Lotso Huggin’ Bear, the (spoilers) villain from Toy Story 3, is omnipresent. T-shirts, backpacks, stickers on motorcycles. You cannot escape him

  • At dinners with my girlfriend’s family, my main method of communication was through drinking

  • Beijing is the best city I saw, and the people there have the best t-shirts of any city in the world

  • China is the worst food country in the world if you are vegetarian

  • Fewer foreigners than I expected. I learned to introduce myself as “a foreign devil”

  • Upon seeing me, one child said to her family “I just saw the funniest person I’ve ever seen”

  • My girlfriend - who is from China but has lived for ~8 years in the US - was told by a driver: “you act like you have freedom and individualism”

  • The ride-hailing app Didi has a preset message for “The pin is correct. Please follow the map.” Uber Kenya – take note

  • At one dinner, my girlfriend’s friends spent a lot of the conversation talking (in Mandarin) about how “it’s better to date a Chinese”. (apparently one friend was dating a Japanese but they broke up because “she was too polite”)

  • One Chinese friend said the part of America that surprised him most was that “you can’t drink on the street”

  • There was a billboard video ad giving motorists examples of tons of drivers who had gotten into accidents. In every case, the explanation of the accident concluded by saying “they died immediately on the spot”

I’ll do a follow up post with some of the most thought-provoking things from my trip.