Saturday, July 07, 2007

Little Details

by Ricardo at 13:40

Hello again,

so after a few more days of studying and going around Beijing, I have collected a few more experiences to share with you:

Money

In China they use yuans has money, where you will find almost everything is done with bills/notes, almost no coins. (10 yaun = 1 Euro) and you will find the bills go to 1 yuan or even 50 cents of yuan. So you have bills of 5 cents of euro. Incredible number of bills brings something to the market: Counterfeit.

We received the following message after a few days here. "Counterfeit notes are a problem in China. Very few Chinese will accept a Y50.00 (5 Euros) or Y100.00 (10 Euros) note without first checking to see whether or not it's a fake. Notes that are old, tattered, or torn are also sometimes hard to spend. You can exchange notes for new ones at the Bank of China. Counterfeits, however, will be confiscated. Local Chinese have a variety of methods for checking notes, including checking the watermark, the drawn lines (more distinct in fake notes) and color (more pronounced in counterfeit notes). The texture of a fake note also tends to be smoother than authentic notes. Examine large denomination notes if they are given to you as change by street vendors; they could well be dumping a forged banknote on you. One note: There have been cases where even the cash machines can also give counterfeit notes".

Toilets

I don't know if you've ever been in China, but they mostly only have holes in the ground when you need to go to the bathroom. When I say almost, it's because 1 in 100 toilets is a normal seating toilet. Now, the other day I asked a chinese where to find the normal (for me) toilets. He brought me a chair with a hole in the middle. :-)

I could only smile. You've probably seen the image Dani has posted a few days ago with this chair.

Sun

On sunday was my first sighting of the Sun and the Blue sky. The city is very polluted and some days it's difficult to breath due to the extreme temperatures (about 35 degrees every day) and extreme humidity, which has put everyone in here sick at one point or another. The sky is grey most of the time, and yesterday I was reading the local news (no, not in chinese) and the estimate is 3.5 million cars in Beijing by beginning of 2008. The government wants to stop traffic for 2 million cars on the last month before the Olympic Games, and clear the skies. Now that will be a challenge.

Driving

If you ever used a bicycle, and suddenly was put in your hands a car but you would continue using the rules of bicycles, I would say you have just arrived in china. There are no traffic lights although they are there, there are no zebra passage for people although they are there, there are no blinking lights for change of directions, because they don't exist in bicycles, and the size of a car must be the same size of a bicycle in the minds of the chinese taxi drivers, because I always think we are going to crash, normally against buses. But in all this mess, there is a normality. Don't ask me to explain. It just works.

Tjai Tje from Beijing,

Ricardo

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