People who have traveled to China, what is your "WTF China" story? r/AskReddit | Reddit Jar

people who have traveled to China what is your WTF China story waiting to use an ATM standing about five feet behind the person using it like any normal American would another person walks up and stands directly behind the guy using it then another then another then another nuts to butts no space between them I am now 6th in line for the ATM I visited Shanghai and I stumbled into the marriage market hundreds of elderly parents with fliers with photos and resumes of their unmarried adults children milling about trying to arrange matches it was like seeing the floor of a busy stock exchange a black friend of mine said that a little Chinese girl came up and licked him because her friends told her that he was made of chocolate I once had a friend who had traveled to China with her family who told me a story where they were at a cafe one afternoon and were watching the cars on the street nearby there was a driver of a car who rear-ended a guy on a bicycle and knocked him off there was a big caliber ring around the scene until a crowd of people took a hold of the car driver and the bicycle driver jumped into the car and drove over the foot of the car driver as the crowd held him into place the bike driver who just drove over the one guy's foot got out of the car thanked the crowd and pushed his bike away the car driver who just got his foot ran over limped back to the car and drove away edit row' this comments that overnight for me and came out on the other side with only two comments calling out misspelled words I haven't changed the spelling because I was wrong and I don't like revisionist history I don't know whether to be proud of ashamed of Reddit for either recognizing the misspelled and not calling it out or not even recognizing that I did and spelled bicycle or clamoring right so many I worked at as an IT manager for a college in Nanjing my boss who was Chinese actually probably still is got his job because he was an excellent table tennis player he knew nothing about computers but acted like he did to say face he also made the same amount per month as me but within a month was driving a new BMW and was wearing a Rolex lots of kickbacks and corruption there edited for clarity used to travel to China Forex per year for several years for business got into taxi to go from bus station and Z gun to hotel right after picking us up the taxi driver stops and lets in a policeman in the front seat they proceeded to discuss how much it would cost to get the drivers friend out of police detention policeman calls his supervisor at the police station to negotiate a bribe amount while getting a finder's fee himself for facilitating the transaction wasn't surprised by the corruption but rather by how open it was since I am ethnically Chinese they probably thought I was a local and can be ignored I am a very normal looking female American dirty blond hair blue eyes five foot five when I was in Beijing people kept walking up behind me and then their friend would take a picture of us at first I was like what the f ck is going on then I finally got someone to tell me that a lot of Beijing tourists are people from the country making a big trip to the city and have never seen a white person in real life so after that when someone would try to sneak up behind me I would just smile and use some sort of sign language to say let's just take the picture together so there are about 20 random Chinese country people with pictures of me like we are best friends at random spots around Beijing I traveled to China this past May and I was shocked at the amount of little kids who don't wear diapers and that they go to the bathroom right in the street or wherever they happen to be we were in the Forbidden City on a very crowded day and a little girl squatted down and peed right in the middle of a crowd everyone acted like it was normal and then people proceeded to walk through the puddle WTF China we also watched two men get into a fistfight in the middle of a crowded street because they had road rage my teacher points it out like hey those guys are getting into a fight like it was some sort of spectacle Hanna went to a temple just outside of Shanghai and I desperately needed to go to the toilets to pierce I had been to many places in Asia so I wasn't fazed by the squad toilets but this whole toilet block was something else it was grotty at fck had a one-inch pool of water all across the ground and smelled terrible there were no cubicles no walls nothing just six or eight squat toilets on the ground I don't recall seeing any toilet paper there were two guys [ __ ] one was reading a newspaper the other was talking to two other guys who were just hanging out directly opposite him smoking cigarettes they were all deep in conversation while one guy was squatting down laying a nasty [ __ ] he was farting and I could almost hear the turtles head poking out the only thing which was unusual for them was the white guy who just walked in we got enough food to have a filling breakfast for four adults with plenty left over for ten youin or one dollar 67 I ate an entire pigeon including its brain I had kaolin brain heart kidney weirdest dish I think was frog stir-fry this wasn't frog legs this was just frogs cut in half and stir-fried with a lot of Sacheon seasoning I also had silkworm cocoons just living silkworms in the process of metamorphosis that you find some sesame oil they tasted like buttered lobster honestly to answer the question the sheer variety of meats was my WTF China moment I lived in China for a few years several years back what's so weird is that things that seemed strange at first became so routine that I actually had to wrack my brain to think of examples the one that has always stuck with me was one of my first bus rides when we went down a slight hill and I felt something warm rush over my feet I learned the hard way that day that many babies toddlers don't wear diapers and just have slits in the crotch of their pan when they have to go be it on the street in a store or on a bus they just crouched down and let it flow everyone thought my 14 year old son was Daniel Radcliffe even though he was five feet nine inches with very curly hair this was when one of the Deathly Hallows movies was playing in Shanghai and there were posters and stuff up in a lot of places every so often people would walk up to him point and yell Hallie Potter double quote any time you go into a bar in China and there is another white person there you inevitably make eye contact and eventually we'll talk I met an Irish dude who had just come and from a more remote part of China the hotel he stayed at tried to make the Westerners there feel at home for Christmas it was December he knew they had it a bit wrong when the Christmas tree in the lobby had a Star of David on top and next to it was Santa being crucified I traveled to China about a decade ago some time not long before the Olympics and remember a seam standing in line at the Beijing train station I remember people on big microphones telling everyone to remain calm stand in line and be civil I was queueing for a ticket purchase in a ridiculously long line at the ticket booth in front of me a younger woman tried to sidle her way and cut in line in front of an older woman the old woman started getting angry at the cutter they started screaming at each other and out of nowhere the old woman dropped her shopping bags and went into an Aleph URI on the line cutter I'll never forget how viciously attacking this lady in a split second when the crowd decided to intervene the young woman came out of the pile torn to shreds and bleeding all over the place the old woman just picked up her bags and got right back in line went to a mall in waxey and have the top and bottom of all the escalators were these mean faces a bomber Jackie Chan various rage cartoons and Chinese words my gf informed me that these were signs to watch your step getting on off the escalators as apparently lots of people get sucked in and I wish they died WTF I've lived in the expat community in China for about 16 years ten or so years ago one of my mom's Scandinavian friends was talking on the phone in her native language after the person on the other end hung up they heard a Chinese person on the phone saying next time please speak English or Chinese I went when I was little about five or six and I barely remember it but apparently everywhere I went crowds would surround me and touch my head apparently touching blonde hair was good luck or something I was on exchange at high school in China and the kids decided to show me this game called a Luba a Luba this consisted of the bones in the clasp ganging up on a single kid and hoisting him in the air whilst spreading his legs apart they then would run with the kid still in the air with his legs open at full speed into the side of a door so the kid would get his balls smashed into oblivion weirdest part is there were no hard feelings after the kid just stood up and acted as if this was just a normal occurrence once my hosts took us to a fine dining establishment bill for four of us factory waged for two months the intro course was some sort of fermented fish head soup that smelled exactly like [ __ ] you could put a bullet into my head and I wasn't going to put something that smelled that bad in my mouth one story I have when I was in China was outside a tourist attraction a woman dressed in a uniform was standing by the entrance telling all the cars that were passing by that you needed to pay money to go to a big part of the attraction however that part of the attraction was actually free and the woman wasn't an employee of the attraction at all she was just a random person who was misinforming people and collecting free money she was taking advantage of some tourists lack of knowledge of the attraction to buses and tour guides who knew the attraction was free would just go right past her I was watching a children's game show in China and when the child won the Final Fantasy i Victoria theme played that was on state-run TV furthermore I have to go there for work occasionally to several different cities I hate it there it always reminds me of that part in the matrix when Agent Smith says he can't get over the smell I feel like the smells linger on me and my stuff even after coming home people urinating on the sidewalks constant hacking and smacking I even had the unfortunate circumstance to stay at a 5-star hotel that had bedbugs seriously f ck that place my friend told me a story about his hometown there a smaller city that wanted to show some sophistication by introducing pigeons to their city ecosystem a very European Flair so they imported a bunch of pigeons and set them loose unfortunately not a month later the city stopped their initiative and shame because the locals managed to capture and eat all of the pigeons they had try to introduce the multiple times I saw kids [ __ ] on the sidewalk through their crotchless pants most babies have crotchless pants instead of diapers also the time in Shanghai where a random family came up to my girlfriend and just inserted their baby into her arms and gathered around to take family pictures with her as she held their baby without even saying a word to her first good God I could go on and on Chinese allowing their toddler sons to run around in public and at famous tourist attractions with a shirt and no diaper and pants on little guys could go P&T wherever they wanted best I saw was a guy holding his son out of the window of an or da8 and letting him pee onto the sidewalk I am half Japanese and half Chinese apparently some racist sees past the Chinese part and calls me basically the equivalent of [ __ ] [ __ ] girl double quote bus ride from the city up to the mountains during the trip I saw three people kissing in public outside the bus one man take a sh t on the sidewalk and the guy next to me pissed on the floor of the bus and all over his pants installing a system at a customer's steel mill our Chinese colleague says the mill is very dangerous many people die every year my response do you mean in this industry this region or colleague this factory every year I spent about 60 days in China for work every year I once watched a lady outside in the rain sweeping a puddle with one of those brooms made out of twigs I watched her for about five minutes really put life in perspective another favorite was when I saw small child to take a dump on the sidewalk him and his pants just ignored it and kept walking like nothing happened apparently Street dumps are not an uncommon thing there my sister and I took the train from Chindit Elysion to see the giant buddha we had to use a bathroom when we got on the train and when we arrived the station wasn't completed and there were no bathrooms after a 25-minute bus ride to the park with the Buddha we were close to bursting I asked an old lady to direct to the bathroom and when my sister and I arrived there was an old man with a little table selling soap toilet paper and feminine products set up in front of the facilities as I walked by I had soap and TP in my bag his frail arm shot up and blocked my way what I said in Mandarin he simply held out his hand I asked how much and he said five Jiao which is the equivalent of like 75 cents u.s. I did the coin out of my bag tossed it onto his table and darted him to use the worst restroom I personally visited in China I came out just as a tow bus of Chinese pulled up they filed in without interruption I glared at the old man and said really dot he simply grinned and shrugged his shoulders in 2009 the band I was in at the time was flown out to Beijing to play some gigs at a hotel while there we decided to be touristy and go to the Great Wall on our way there we saw somebody miss their exit on the freeway but instead of continuing on to the next exit they stopped their car put it in reverse and proceeded to back up on the busy freeway was definitely her WTF moment for us I was staying at a decent hotel in one of China's small cities one morning I went outside for an early morning stroll around the hotel unfortunately on this particular morning I came across a fresh pile of human sh t next to a bench not wanting someone to accidentally step in it I found a couple hotel employees nearby to alert he and his fellow underpaid colleagues followed my gestures to the crime scene they continued to follow down my arm and past my pointing finger to the unpleasantness below their eyes went wide when they realized what they were dealing with then my eyes went wide when I thought the horrible idea of what if they think it was me it would be pretty hard to explain my story even without a significant language barrier being ever-resourceful the two concocted the genius plan to put a newspaper over it in pour water on it at that point I stopped caring if they thought it was me and decided it was time to leave getting a foot massage in one of those Pollard's lady comes in with a little toolbox asks something I have no idea what guy I am with says something I don't understand to her tells me she will clean my ears um okay but this isn't just washing my lobes and giving me an Arab thus lady doesn't let and then tips my head this way and that puts a couple of drops at what smells like camphor in then opens up a mental kit and goes in she gets hold of chunks of earwax and my middle ear and works them out all this time I'm having a cough reflex all over the place but she keeps going more and more comes out ridiculous amounts then a quick flushing and man that felt good like I was a friggin new born long story but my brother and his girlfriend got in an argument with the cab driver cab driver kicks my brother and tries to hit his girlfriend brother cause cops they all go to the police station the Chinese cops plan on letting the cabdriver just go with no repercussions and my brother says so he can just kick people and it's totally okay and the cops think for a second and come up with a solution they put my brother in a room alone with the cab driver and told him he could have one free kick to get even in a park set up before the Beijing Games some trees from a warmer part of the country have been replanted as part of an ecological exhibit in a local park except someone realized the Beijing winters were too cold for the trees to survive the solution smell during annular coal pits around the base of the trees maybe the trees now thriving by virtue of their tropical micro climates would cancel out the smog SM H in China it's really common to see babies with these pants that are split down the butt which allow their parents to pick them up and hover them over the ground to pee or poop without actually pulling down the pants I used to see this on the street quite a bit and it was always a surprise one time I was on a train from gives out to Kunming and the lady sitting on the seat facing me had a baby she gets some kind of signal that her infant needs to pee there are toilets on the train but this woman pulled a small wastebasket from under the seat holds her kid above it and the kid lets loose a stream of urine into the wastebasket she then pushes the bin back under the seat and it spends the rest of the trip sloshing around a friend of mine has been a few times he's in his early 60s grey hair gray goatee he had no idea what was in store for him immediately after getting off the airplane and a few times between there and the hotel he was stopped by people asking to take a picture with him the next morning he heads out into the city to meet up with a friend and he's still getting stopped every few minutes for a picture he meets up with his friend and mentions what's been going on and his friend tells him that Chinese people love Kentucky Fried Chicken and they think he looks like Colonel Sanders next trip he decides to grow a full beard get stopped because he looks like Santa can't win I caught the train from Moscow through Almaty and then until your um key western China with a few mates at the border between Kazakhstan and China the Chinese border guard made a very thorough search of our quarters followed by about ten minutes of questioning after they'd finished questioning the other compartments three of them came back to our compartment and started chatting to us about what we were doing and what Britain was like then one editors on weibo chinese facebook and his username was streaked in scarecrow if you're out there streaking scarecrow you're a top lad TLDR we met a scary border guard called streaking scarecrow he's a top lad my friend is a 6-feet woman that is 76 years old with blue eyes and a shock of white hair apparently one tool women all people and two healthy septuagenarians are remarkable enough for mobs to form she finally figured out that if she stood with arms wide apart resting them on top of Chinese people's heads everyone was very pleased several times they insisted on using her camera so she could enjoy the moment later 225 mysterious photos of short-arm support in Chinese went to China for work around 2010 had a free Saturday so I had a cab driver take me to a pet shop in Shanghai always try to visit a pet shop in foreign countries anyway a large portion of the PET SHOP pet market as dozens of older men fighting crickets for money they trade sell and breed crickets as well also many of them were wearing this wooden case thing on a piece of string around their necks I found out that they keep a hibernating beetle in there until it's ready to emerge I have a friend whose dad is involved in a bunch of different businesses one of which involves in being a wholesaler of bagels to various schools colleges etc my friend said that they were looking to sell bagels within China so they went there to set up a stand and see how interested people were in bagels by giving them away they set up a stand very neatly with bagel as well as a few different spreads utensils plates and napkins a short moment later their stand was swarmed with a huge group of people trying to get one he said after a mad dash all of the bagels were gone with everything else on the stand left completely untouched no napkins plates or utensils touched he said there were even people fighting over bagels on the ground I travelled there a decade ago with my GF at the time who had absolutely pale skin brown hair and blue eyes sometimes we would just get a crowd of more than a dozen people following us around mostly women just staring at her and taking photos we had a few pregnant women walk up to us and ask my GF to rub their bellies Chinese people are pretty cool though I was expecting it to be heartless and unfriendly due to extreme population density and struggles under communism but people looked out for us and grew very helpful not a single bad experience of someone being dicks to us interesting to see strangers fend off beggars that approached us I'll go back one day when the pollution is less I have been living in Beijing for the last three years I have encountered all WTF China but will tell you my most recent one I got paid 2,000 RMB to travel to a city an hour away and give a five-minute speech pretending to be from an American health company then got a free amazing lunch and got hammered with the company staff and then took the train back to Beijing so many of these random jobs are still around in China where they pay for a white-faced to make the company seem like it has an international presence the amount of severely mutilated beggars near the Forbidden City was astonishing most of them were missing at least one or two limbs some missing three some of them were blind death or obvious burn victims at least half of them were singing karaoke into a microphone plugged into a miniature and then the ones without legs would slide around on a skateboard I saw six these people within a four-block radius truly horrifying especially when you consider they were most likely hurt on purpose so they could make money begging I've lived in China for a couple of six months since while my mum was studying and I have a few stories the first one that comes to mind is the story of the rat in our apartment my brother was shower in one day when suddenly he started yelling and came running out shouting rat rat followed by said rat that quickly disappeared under a bed we lived on the University campus so my mum called the lady in charge of foreign students and was trying to explain that we had a rat in the apartment what should we do she thought we had a pet rabbit we wanted to get rid of after some time we got the message across and a guy came down to the apartment with a large stick patch that he put on the floor in the room then we waited eventually the rat got stuck on the patch and he went and picked it up he looked around the room and saw my brother's cricket bat can I borrow that sure he takes her downstairs and we just hear this crack and he brings the bat back up to us and says goodbye there was blood and fur on the bat my friends and I went to a karaoke place with a liquor store attached a stabbing had very clearly occurred moments before we got there and there was blood on the floor they still sold us beers also towards the end of my study abroad program there we went to some touristy areas near Shanghai and I started taking pictures of the Chinese people that were taking pictures of me I don't know if this counts as real China but I was in Hong Kong in 2001 I had awesome Indian food in the loft area of the market the shop owners were Sikh and spoke Cantonese Punjabi and English the guy was a big dude too probably going about 6 feet 3 inches and 272 there was a squeeze bottle with a label that said America sauce as it would be it was ranch dressing with over there during the 75th anniversary of the Communist Party and during the brexit vote had been watching Bloomberg and Hotel CCTV to stay tuned on the brexit vote in fallout ended up watching CCP propaganda shows quite a lot went out with wife's friends who were both CCP members and involved at a city level I get so [ __ ] smashed on this crap liquor that I'm sure was pure ethanol I started reciting all the sh t I learned from TV about how great the CCP is the wife couldn't hold back her tears and gave me her party badge and shook my hand not sure if I can't run for Chinese president yet but it's on my list this was 1997 just before den died I was on a work trip to Hong Kong and got to take a tour of Dongguan mainland China right by HK including a couple of production lines VCRs I think first one the bus rolls up to a dozen or more women in shorts and tight shirts come running out of a barracks like building towards us once they spot that it's a bunch of Westerners in the bus they turn around and walk back to the barracks we were told later that these are largely young women from the rural areas who initially came to Dongguan to do factory work but found out that prostitution paid far better apparently at the time it was not at all unusual to find brothels set up next to larger factories [Music]

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Id: Rpa4t4kFdZ8

Length: 28min 15sec (1695 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 22 2020