Well, stop with that nonsense, see the opportunities and applaud the ones who tries to make a change! One of Volvo Group’s newest introductions to the market is a smart phone application that can help you reduce your CO2 footprint! It’s called Commute Greener.

I’m going to copy paste this now because I can’t say this better than Volvo; Commute Greener “monitors individual progress against your personal CO2 reduction targets, track the distance, time and CO2 emission of your daily commute and share progress and experience in a trusted, online community”!

And to all game loving chinese guys that we met so far, you can COMPETE with your friends, family and colleagues!

So peek through your pile of school books and read interesting  facts about the app and CO2 at: www.commutegreener.com and http://commutegreenerinfo.com/.

Elina!

So, to continue on this culture differences theme, I’ll start with what first happened when we got of our airplane. We headed for the taxi station and Xiaying went to ask the price.

450 yuan, the taxi man said smirking.

Hanna and Xiaying shook their heads and said something like “typical, tyring to trick us, this should cost 100″.

I was of course taken a back, and wondered what we were going to do, as tricking people is highly agressive behavior in Sweden. But Hanna and Xiaying just laughed and told me that this was just normal chinese culture. And I should have known, as price dealing  is common in many countries. But as always, I’m stupified when something isn’t as it  is at home.

So that was my first cultural clash, and from now on I will celebrate the chinese culture by price fighting as much as I can!

Elina

“Hej snygging!”

Translating, this means “Hello hottie!”, which made my poor Scandinavian soul go on high alert with sirens, cutlery crashing and children screaming. I mean, I shouldn’t have turned on crazy mode because I see myself as a global citizen. Open-minded and full of humor. And as my father is Ethiopian and I’ve meet diffrenent examples of the culture, I now know that commenting on ugly,fat and even beautiful people is common, at least there. Maybe it is a common global phenomenon, unknown to me and the rest up here?! 

In Sweden even the most socially skilled person, multi-cultural and inviting, avoid the subject of looks. Because you don’t tell other people how they look.

You dont:

1. Tell people they’re fat
2. Tell people their children are ugly
3. Comment on very beautiful people so others hear
4. Don’t tell people things that could be understood as harassments like “Hey there hottie!”

Basically, you just don’t mention the appearance of people, if you don’t have the two following excuses:

1. You like how the person dress so you comment on how nice the person looks in her CLOTHES
2. You’re drunk

In this country only crazy people talk about looks. And yes, sometimes some confused tourist or global person who multi tasked too long between different cultures. 

Truly,

Elina

If you wake up early in the morning and go on a walk in the streets you will find a lot of workers cleaning the streets with big brooms, particularly in smaller cities. Well as technology goes forward, the worker are modernizing the way they clean the streets, sometimes with street sweepers, and sometimes with some homemade technology…

Breakfast is rather important to make you feel better the whole day. When it comes to Chinese breakfast you have large variety of things to choose from. Baozi(包子) and Mantou(馒头) are two of them, which are steamed. Well most chinese people in big cities buy their breakfast on the way to work. Demand is huge, and supply has to catch up.

So after the breakfast you take the subway to your work, at the same time as all the students are taking the subway to school. The Chinese students study so much harder. They study so hard that the following can happen.

China, with its 1,3 billion people is not really a place to be medieval. In order to find a job and be seen you have to be excel at things you do and be different from others. The concurrence is really high, and cruel. So it’s really about being special and being able to stick out.

Chinese students live on the campus when they study in universities or colleges. They have to do the laundries themselves, but more than often there aren’t any tumble driers available on the campus so the clothes have to be dried out naturally. But if there are 4 students in the same room, there is hardly room for it, is there?

Like Swedish students, Chinese students date a lot when they study in universities. In some schools, particularly technical schools, there are usually a lot more boys than girls. Actually this problem is more general, the total man:woman ratio in China is 117:100. This is a serious problem, indeed.

So now, after a day of hard studies or work, you are on your way home. The Chinese rush-hour traffic is rather grueling. imagine yourself that half of city’s population are moving by public transportation, by bike or by car, simultaneously, as it is the case with Beijing. There is traffic jam, and accidents do happen. But one thing you don’t want to do is to hit the police maintaining the traffic. Things can get ugly.

Actually I would say that Chinese are the most environment-friendly people in the world. Just look at the huge amount of people that cycle to school or work to prove my point. And even bikes can be homemade, with some environment-friendly thoughs…

Ok, once again that the pictures are exaggerating a bit. I hope that you learned something about China and are now in a really happy mood:)

Förberedelserna inför den bästa EXPO någonsin pågår för fullt. Man vill ju visa upp det bästa av Shanghai för resten av världen. Men precis som inför OS i Peking är det svårt att undgå att prata om kommunikation och engelska kunskaper bland kineserna. På samma sätt som singlish(Singapore engelska), och ja, varför inte svengelska, har också kineserna lyckats kombinera engelska med sitt modersmål. Språket kallas pidgin-engelska, eller rent av missförstånd, pigeon-engelska. Här följer det ett exempel på hur det fungerar:

Engelska: Thank you very much!

Pidgin-engelska : 生发油抹来抹去，eller på pinyin: “sheng fa you mo lai mo qu”. Om man uttalar det här på shanghai-dialekten så kan man komma riktigt nära det engelska uttalet!

Såg denna skylt i närheten av Shanghai, kanske är det pidginengelska in action?

Detta “språk” utövades framförallt i Kanton, Hongkong , Shanghai och en del andra stora handelshamnar i Kina från 1700-talet till ungefär 1900. Sedan började fler och fler kineser lära sig den riktiga engelskan i skolan och pidgin-engelska tappade det mesta av sin marknad. Men än i dag kan man höra denna förenklade variant av engelskan i Shanghai. Det kanske är något att tänka på om du har dina vägar förbi Shanghai någon gång.

En annan kvarleva från tidigare visar hur man kunde addera två kulturer och forma en ny. Det är nämligen så att invånarna i Shanghai gärna går ut i nattkläder. Nattkläderna tillhörde den del av västerländsk kultur som kineserna tidigt lyckades snappa upp, då nattkläderna ursprungligen inte hörde hemma i den kinesiska garderoben. Under det fattiga 70- och 80-talet var det dock få som hade pengar över till ett par lyxiga nattplagg, så nattkläderna blev ett tecken på hur välbärgat man levde. Men Shanghais varma somrar och kalla vintrar gjorde det svårt för kineserna att verkligen använda dem i sängen, det blev att man började gå i dem på gatorna istället. Så formades den unika “nattkläder-kulturen” i Shanghai. Nu avråder EXPOs organisatör folk från att gå i nattkläder på gatorna för att det kan tolkas som “ociviliserat”. Vi får väl avvakta och se hur det hela slutar.

Du har kanske sett filmen Kung Fu Hustle? Det sägs att den här rollen har en viss koppling till “nattkläder-kulturen”…

“sheng fa you mo lai mo qu” och vi hörs snart igen! /F.L