From the totally random department…
https://youtu.be/qb3_Yzr-WVE
The guy in this video is a Canadian who speaks fluent Chinese and wanders around trying food in local markets and an occasional restaurant. The people in China are not used to seeing a foreigner and he startles them by speaking to the merchants in Chinese.
I’ve concluded from these YouTube videos and similar ones he did in India, that once Obama declares martial law and starts killing all white people ??, I would be much more comfortable living in China than India. The Chinese people are uniformly friendly and welcoming and fastidiously clean and careful about hygiene.
The thing that immediately stands out in videos from India is the incessant honking of car horns. The food vendors seem unhappy and annoyed with their existence, in addition to generally drowning everything in curry.
I wonder if he ended up marrying a woman from China. An older woman who was selling fresh pork was trying to fix him up and insisted on giving him free pork bones to make soup. The other videos are substantially more interesting than this one, but the cultural cross pollination is unique. Chinese women are not necessary known for their hooters.
Thats good stuff !
Hooters make you happy !
parrott
Cool man! I like it. Fred has it – India’s cleanliness is in constant question. Granted, China has backwoods locations with no modern fixtures such as running water, but the people remain mostly friendly (out in the country, they still have Communist propaganda views of Americans) and I would say – Chinese is not that hard to speak. Reading? Well, that’s a different story.
On one of the India videos I asked if the plates and cups were washed between uses. Many people probably didn’t even notice that the plates and cups were not disposable. Given the street vendors don’t have access to water, call me skeptical. Swishing them in a tub of room temperature water with a few drops of detergent is not enough.
When you eat in a restaurant on china, the food ware must be sanitized between customers to kill pathogens. Normally that means a washing process that uses water at least 180 degrees hot. As an alternative, chlorine based chemicals can be used.
One of the more problematic things I saw was an Indian place making some egg dish. One of the guys was in charge of breaking the eggs. At one point in the video, he goes right from the eggs (throwing the shells on the ground) to handing the finished cooked product to the customer. Eggs don’t necessarily have to be kept refrigerated. In commercial egg production in the United States, they wash off the “bloom”, the natural protection – and replace it with a coating of mineral oil.
The clean freak type people are the ones likely to think you need to wash the eggs before putting them in the refrigerator. Washing eggs removes the mineral oil and leaves the eggs open to migration of air through the shell (the empty area inside the egg is the indicator of how old the egg is. The most unsanitary place to store eggs is in the egg rack in your refrigerator. Leave them in the sealed container you brought home from the store
One issue which impacts hygienic practices in India is their lingering caste system. Another may be a lack of defined public hygiene statutes and enforcement/punishment of such laws.
Spit or defecate in the streets of India, and there’s no real concern about consequences… do the same thing in Singapore and you’ll be facing some serious jail-time and hefty fines.
I suspect the quasi-police state of China leans closer to Singapore in how they address such public behavior.
So San Francisco is more similar to India…
lol According to Savage it’s an amalgam of both.
At one point, he is talking to an old Chinese man who says that at first, he thought the Canadian guy might be Japanese and he was glad he was Canadian. The guy felt an obligation to look into the camera and express his disapproval. Canada has intense punishments for any kind of offensive speech. He missed a great learning opportunity to ask the Chinese man why he hates Japan, a view also shared by Koreans for similar reasons.
I factor in to my observation that these are merchants, although they are in markets outside the tourist areas. I suspect many of the people he was talking to do understand English well enough to comprehend what he is saying into the camera.
On none of videos does he haggle over prices. I hate haggling, but I’m pretty sure haggling is expected and just saying “give me 10 rupees worth of that” marks you as a chump. The most “foreign” place I’ve been is Canada, so my understanding is mostly from listening to travel shows.
I really found the hooters video disturbing. He really at times plays the role of the “ugly Canadian”, steamrolling right over the social norms, especially his interaction with women.
Back when my niece was looking at undergraduate colleges, my sister and she came to my place in Connecticut. Although she wasn’t interested in Yale, we went to Yale and had lunch in downtown New Haven. Because her father would not fill out financial paperwork, she ended up going to SUNY Buffalo rather than Harvard, who was actively recruiting her. On the way, we drove past a Hooters on Boston Post Road in Milford. I didn’t point it out, but they saw it and started saying how awful it was that women were being exploited there. My response was that I had never been in there and had no interest in going in the place. That didn’t stop the lecture. I would be totally shocked if my niece announced she had a boyfriend. Then again, that applies to me, too.