First impressions of China – Observations volume 4.

• You can’t get away without speaking Chinese.  BUT, it’s easy to speak English a lot.  Especially in places like Beijing, where “Chinglish” (pigeon Chinese and English) is the vernacular of choice for foreigner (Laowai) to Chinese (Zhongwen) communication.
• Western brands with Chinese names.  There are three steps to translating a Western brand into Chinese.  Step 1: take any words which are part of the brand name that can be translated and do so.  Step 2: Imagine a Chinese person with no English trying to say the name, and write it down phonetically.  Step 3: Put the two together.  Bonza.  Prime example: Starbucks = Xing ba ke (“Xing” means star, and “ba ke” sounds like “bucks”).  Or Yi jea (Ikea).  It does undo me sometimes.   I ate at a nice restaurant and wanted to order a traditional Chinese beer.  So I ordered “Bai wei”.  A Budweiser bottle arrived on the table.  My Chinese host explained.  I was embarrassed.  
• Old people exercise a lot here.  Probably more than young people.  It’s probably a morbid fascination/ fear of mortality (they are closer to it, technically, than we are) that makes them so.  Clapping has to be the exercise I see the most.  Lots of clapping.  And lots of old people at the gym.
• Clothes are SUPER expensive.  (And super is a super annoying word that I had started to use).  Like, a western brand can cost at least twice as much as it does in the West.  If you want to dress cheaply, think a downmarket version of Next, and you’re probably not far off what you can get.
• Starbucks is a premium brand here.  Enough said really.  It’s sold in all the upmarket areas and for a high premium.  Considering you can have a fairly good meal for 80p, paying the equivalent of £2.50 for a small cappuccino is bit rich.
• Goodbye YouTube.  It’s banned.  Goodbye Facebook and Twitter, they’re banned too.   Hello to Youku and welcome to RenRen (literally “people, people” = Facebook) and Wei bo (Twitter).  They are everywhere, particularly Wei Bo.  More on this later.
• Cardboard on car wheels.  Looks like they’ve been clamped, with cardboard, but actually there to stop dogs weeing on them, apparently.
• Plastic bags on plates.  Particularly when it comes to street food.  Reduces the washing up.  The plastic adds, I think, an extra layer of taste to the cuisine.
• (p.s. I just saw the Chinese doppelganger of Barack Obama.  Couldn’t get my camera out in time.  Darn it.)