China vs. America

welcome to another video if you've come here for politics guys i'm afraid you've come to the wrong place this video is not about politics it's about the difference between living in china and living in america for those of you who have seen any of my videos before you'll know that i've been living here in mainland china for over 10 years in fact turns out i'm the first guy to ever make v-logs out of mainland china on youtube i've just gotten back from a trip to america and i really enjoyed myself a good friend of mine showed me around i went all over the place i went to you know los angeles went to las vegas went into arizona went down to tombstone and uh you know i've seen quite a lot of what america has to offer at least on the west and uh southwestern areas of america anyway now i know some people might get upset that i say america and not the usa or north america but hey i've grown up my whole life knowing the usa as america so i'm just going to refer to it as america if that upsets you sorry i'm just going to have to deal with it i have to deal with drinking chinese beer so i think it's fair all right so let's talk about the differences between china and america the first one i'm going to talk about probably one of the biggest ones is food i couldn't believe the portions when i went to america you know it was my first time to america i've been to england and the uk and little bits of europe here and there and of course africa and china and india and thailand and taiwan and various other places around you know japan various other places around asia first time in my life i've been somewhere where the portions of food are so massive now it's a good and it's a bad thing i mean i absolutely love the value for money you get when you order anything in america it comes with heaps of other stuff it's always huge and the upside is i didn't have a single bad meal while i was in america every single thing that i had to eat in america was delicious absolutely amazing tasted great and i thoroughly enjoyed it now while you can still get big portions of food here in china the way people eat here in china is very different to the way people eat in the west and america and that is people share food so you'll be sitting at a table and there'll be a big plate of meats and then a big plate of vegetables and a big plate of rice or noodles etc and people share so you kind of just take from whichever dish you want until you get full and then you stop eating but in america and other western countries you get your own plate and that's your plate and you're kind of obliged to finish your own plate so the fact that you're getting these massive portions and you kind of end up eating the whole thing first of all because it's so delicious but second of all because it's yours it's there it's in front of you i can see why there's a big sort of weight problem in america and before i talk about the whole weight issue let's talk about some of the actual differences in the food itself here in china people like to eat rice like to eat noodles lots of vegetables and food isn't very processed in fact it's very common for people to go to the local wet markets in the morning buy their vegetables fresh go and cook them for that day and the food you'll find is usually quite simple chopped up vegetables chopped up meat kind of thrown into a wok and fried with you know then it to some steamed rice and that's pretty much it of course you do get some more complicated dishes up all around the country it's a very diverse country and the food is very diverse but in essence most of the food is very simple and it's at its core elements whereas in america you find everything is very processed you know you've got all these weird and wonderful sources and ways of preparing the meat and you know what you get on your plate is a masterpiece of engineering and years and years of scientific research whereas here it's basically chop it up cook it eat it that being said the food quality in china is very suspect and although it seems healthier at first when you find out where the vegetables are grown and how the meat is raised actually the food can be quite toxic and you know there are a lot of food scandals here so in essence it's much healthier here in china the food but in practice it often ends up being less healthy than in countries like america you've got health standards and you know sort of repercussions for you know having a bad hygiene in your restaurant for instance let's talk about the the whole weight thing i'm not gonna lie i was fairly shocked when i got to america because it's the first time in my life i've seen so many obese people and you know i've been to a fair many places around the world and this is the first time wherever i looked there was somebody who is seriously overweight and i guess it's just the norm and i'm not trying to judge here and in fact i can't blame you because the food there is so delicious and so cheap i mean you know you get sort of three dollar deals you know two slices of pizza and a super sip or super gulp or whatever they call it um you know who can resist the food's so good it's so cheap if i was living in america i promise you right now i'd weigh three times what i weigh now just because of the delicious and readily available cheap food everywhere and that's no lie however you can immediately see the kind of repercussions that it has because when you watch tv in america pretty much i'd say two-thirds of all the adverts on tv are for medical products to help cure sort of all these little diseases and ailments that come along with being so heavily overweight so america i'm just going to say it now no big judgments there i understand it but should probably do something about your weight issue because you know it was a bit of a shocker to me to see so many people so overweight now you see the differences over here in china is that everybody walks everywhere first of all it's a lot cheaper second of all it's very convenient the way neighborhoods and cities are set up you have access to just about everything you need within walking distance so you'll have supermarkets wet markets restaurants places of work etc you'll have like subway stations or bus stations nearby so you kind of end up walking a lot and every day you know i've got a little walking app thing tracks how many steps you take every day on average i walk about 10 000 steps just doing my regular things here in china and that definitely keeps the weight down whereas in america well your roads are good your traffic is in chaos like it is here because right here in china the traffic is atrocious people don't know how to drive cars are new to everybody here people do not obey the traffic laws and so it's a mess so you know driving here is first of all chaotic and very frustrating but second of all just not convenient and also very expensive because you don't get free parking anywhere like in america a lot of the malls you can go park outside for free you can park at your house for free you can't do that here you have to pay for parking at your own house you have to pay for parking in the malls so that's a huge difference and that's also why people just drive everywhere and that also kind of contribute contributes to the whole overweight thing let's talk about cost of living for a minute here this beer cost me five rmb at a well this is kind of like an outdoor restaurant it's not really a restaurant and if i go to the supermarket it will cost me 4.8 rmb so the guy's not really even making a profit on this if i wanted to have food at this restaurant which i probably am not going to because um well it's it's a really dingy dirty little place to be honest and i love eating from places like this but i'm trying to cut down i'm trying to get healthier if i were to eat here my whole meal and my beer and everything would be less than 20 rmb which is i'll put up the us dollar amount here it's not a lot food is incredibly cheap here in china but on the flip side i found that food was also incredibly cheap in america the difference is in america you have to pay tips whereas here in china you don't pay any tips in fact if you try to tip them they'll think you're probably trying to bribe them or get some kind of guanchi so they will usually refuse a tip so food i'd say although cheap in america is cheaper here in china for sure however the quality of the food that you get in america is way better i mean way way way way better just the choice the flavors that kind of thing for my own personal taste anyway i know a lot of people will argue with me because china does have and i'm not going to lie does have a vast array and an amazing amount of different kinds of foods and tastes too but the thing is you know for sure that the food that you're eating in america is safe and if it's not safe somebody's going to get into a lot of trouble whereas if i eat something here and i get kind of sick or a little bit of food poisoning or an upset stomach that guy wouldn't care and if i went to the police or something they wouldn't care either unless i was dead so you know they can get away with being as unhealthy as they want to really so food much of a muchness let's move on to rent now rent depends on the city you want to live in if you want to live in a first-tier city like shenzhen here or shanghai beijing guangzhou or any of the bigger cities in china you're going to pay a very high rent in fact it's very comparable to the kind of rent you'd be paying in america for instance a single bedroom apartment somewhere in this area will cost you about four thousand rmb a month a two bedroom apartment upwards of six thousand plus and if you want a really big nice apartment you know sort of western sized apartment you're going to be paying more than 10 000 rmb a month however if you want to go to a smaller third tier city fourth tier city you can get a massive big sort of four bedroom apartment for about a thousand five hundred a month so it really depends on where you want to live now just out of interest when i was in arizona passing through phoenix and tucson i took a look at the rentals over there just to see how much people pay and i was shocked to discover that you could actually rent a big house with a swimming pool for about 1 000 to 1500 us dollars a month which is actually quite crazy in my mind because that kind of price here you could get a fancy apartment in a nice city but you couldn't get all house with its swimming pool and everything unless you're out in the rural sticks somewhere and that sort of thing's not really accessible to a foreigner who comes to rent here so rent really just depends on where you want to live but it can be quite high anyway that's rent let's talk about real estate here in china real estate is incredibly expensive and it's ludicrous because you will buy an apartment say you know a little box in the sky because you don't own the land in fact you don't own the apartment anywhere i'll explain in a minute but you'll buy yourself a little box in the sky for a couple of million rmb these days in a city like shenzhen or shanghai or beijing really expensive and it's only a 70 year lease you're only leasing it from the government it doesn't actually belong to you and the buildings that these apartments are in well they don't actually even last 70 years they usually last about 50 years before they need to be knocked down and rebuilt so it's kind of a ludicrous situation over here where property is concerned whereas i saw in america two hundred thousand dollars you can buy a reasonably okay little house somewhere um you know and it's yours and the land belongs to you and that's that so property way better in america than here in china for sure 100 and the fact that you can actually own it in america may as well talk about transport as well that's something that's really cheap here public transport is incredibly cheap petrol or gasoline as you call it in america is actually quite a lot more expensive over here than it is in america's kind of surprise to find out but over here it's about seven rmb for a liter i'll put the conversion here how much per gallon or whatever but it is way cheaper in america i remember that next thing i want to talk about is safety now before i went to america a lot of my subscribers were leaving comments like oh no you better watch out because you know in america they've got guns and there's all this gun violence and it's such a dangerous place etc etc let me just um let you guys in on a little secret i come from south africa my country trumps your country when it comes to violence if you ever wanted to have a pissing contest to see whose country has better crime or more crime my country will win every single time so i'm used to violence and violent crime and all this kind of nonsense because it's just part of everyday life in south africa it's kind of like trying to explain to a dairy farmer what milk tastes like let's put it that way so yeah i found america incredibly safe i mean seriously as long as you know which areas not to go into and as long as you know how to you know judge or you know feel a room and judge the situation you'll be fine i mean venice beach for instance yeah there are a couple of strung out druggies hanging around you get a couple of homeless people here and there but you know what they all seem to be dealing with their own stuff they don't really seem to be trying to go out there and attack you and you just keep an eye on these kind of people and you know you'll be fine so from my own perspective i think america is an incredibly safe place i wasn't once tried like no one tried to hijack me i wasn't shot at you know i had no problems now yes there are gun crimes in america and you know there was a big orlando shooting actually just before i went but you know what these kind of things happen and uh it's an absolute tragedy but here in china we don't have mass shootings we have mass stabbings and you know it's quite common actually you don't it doesn't get as much news coverage because that's how china works they kind of block anything sensitive or anything that makes china look bad gets blocked so you won't see big headline news around the world about a crazy guy breaking into a kindergarten and stabbing like 20 children to death but this happens fairly often and it happens often enough that you kind of get these senses desensitized to it in fact stabbings happen all the time in china mass stabbings in public places stabbings in kindergartens for some reason that seems to always happen and that's why you'll always see armed not on but these kind of security guys are these long poles standing outside of kindergartens and high schools and middle schools you know they've got a big whine and that's to stop these uh stabbing crazy guys from killing children because for some reason they always go for the kids so yeah there's a lot of violence and there's a lot of um there are a lot of murders and things happening here in china the difference is you as a foreigner won't be affected being a foreigner living in china is incredibly safe it's very rare that somebody will attack a foreigner here they'll scam you they'll try to cheat you but they won't actually physically try to attack you unless of course you attack them first or provoke that um national nationalist pride which i've warned people about before so i'd say as a foreigner living in china yes it's safer than living in a place like america overall but china is not overall a safer place in america because it has just as much violent crime and murders and things like that if not more it's just not as widely reported as america the final thing i'd just like to say before i wrap this video up is the diversity i was kind of blown away by the diversity in america and by that i mean you walk around and you see people all dressed up in different ways and different styles many different races all together you have the whole uh subculture thing you see sort of goths over here and you'll see sort of a country and western style people here and your cowboys and what have you and i was you know skaters surfers all that kind of thing and it was really refreshing to see such a big amount of diversity when it comes to people's personalities because here in china unfortunately it's a very sort of homogeneous very monocultural sort of setup and yes there are something like 52 different ethnic minorities here in china but at the core they're all more or less the same when you go and meet them and talk to them they sort of follow the same routines have very similar traditions and almost an identical outlook on life so it kind of gets a little how can we say boring after a while living here because it doesn't matter who you meet they've all got the same sort of questions for you they all have the same sort of outlook on life so it takes away some of the fun of life and the diversity so america really kind of impressed me with that and i really enjoyed that part of being there that's it guys i hope you found this informative and for those of you who are still maybe deciding where you prefer to live or where you'd like to visit etc i hope this has been helpful that's really it for this one guys i look forward to seeing you in my next video and until then as always stay awesome you

Channel: serpentza

Views: 574,296

Rating: 4.6632795 out of 5

Keywords: America, USA, United States, United States of America, China, Adventure, Bikes, Beer, Food, Cost of Living, Drinking Culture, Culture, Rude, social etiquette, Polite, SerpentZA, Winston Sterzel, China versus America, What's the difference, Safety, Gun Crime, Stabbings, people, Chinese people, American people, Diversity, moving to China, Living in China

Id: zLK9I6V1BGY

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2016