Having such a solid foundation of Asian culture from Bali, Thailand, Nepal and India it is hard not to compare these to China. Firstly it is way way cleaner and it’s not just the sewage, I can’t help but notice how much healthier people are and really quite hygiene conscious. I believe there was a big health campaign and it seems to have really worked. So I am quite happy as this stuff grosses me out a bit and takes the edge of the enjoyment of a country so I am quite charmed. The people on mass are very well behaved they are good queuers and mergers, mind you I don’t think I will ever be brave enough to drive a car here. In India it’s a struggle to just buy a ticket but here there while there is a lot of people the service is efficient and fair. We don’t get hassled to buy stuff in the street, in fact it’s the opposite, they rightly assume we can’t speak much Mandarin so leave us alone. We have to travel with our destination written in Chinese as most people don’t have any English and even the hand symbols for numbers are different. Individually everyone has been helpful, curious and polite, we have been ripped off once with a taxi ride from the airport at Chengdu, he charged us a flat rate of 100RMB ($15) and it should have been half that, but after that the taxi’s have been metered and cheap. The taxi from the train station at Yabuli was 70RMB and insisted on upfront payment so we figured we were getting ripped off but didn’t care just happy to be out of the cold but it turned out to be quite a long ride and 70 was probably the correct fare.
