One other thing...about Expo!

I just had to add one thing to the post I just made about the Expo.  I told you all that the Expo place was big but I need to put that in a greater context.  Today at the Expo, they had 425,800 people visit!!!!  Can you even imagine that number of people in one place?  That is roughly 7.5 times more people than the entire population of the city in the US where we moved here from!!  And we think a football stadium that holds 100,000 people is amazing!  By the way, that is just ONE days worth of visitors!  So far the World Expo website says that they have had 30,831,900 people visit!  That’s right...almost 31 million people!  Does that not just floor you?  It does me.  The majority of the visitors are Chinese and coming from parts all over China.  You have never seen a herd of tour buses or people until you have seen the parking areas around the Expo.

John and I always laugh that the Chinese people, for the most part, don’t really have any concept of personal space – meaning that we get bumped into more here then any where we have ever lived or traveled.  Imagine Super Walmart the day before Christmas and you are just beginning to have a very small taste of what it is to live in this mega-city of Shanghai.  But we laugh because you know, in the US, if you bump into someone the polite thing to do is say, excuse me or pardon me or something.  But here, they literally bump into you and just keep on walking not thinking anything of it.  At first I got so annoyed by this – I mean, where are your manners, people???  But then I realized that when you live in a country with over a BILLION people, if you say excuse me every time you bumped into someone that might be all you are ever doing!  I’m exaggerating a bit on that but really, our sense of personal space in the US is so different especially when you consider that most of the people here in Shanghai live in tiny high-rise apartments not much bigger than 400-500 square feet with neighbors all around them.  The other funny thing they do at the grocery store if your basket is in their way is they just bump into it until you either move it or it moves out of the way on it’s own.  Again, it used to drive me crazy but now I find that I just go through the store bump, bump, bumping along not thinking anything of it.  And strangely, they don’t think I’m being rude a bit.  I can just imagine that I will move back to our small mid-western town and get quite the talking to when I’m in Walmart and bump someone’s cart not thinking of where I am and how, “oh yeah, that’s RUDE!” :)

Well, these are the things that we learn and grow and love about getting to experience a different culture so close-up.  And on that note, I just want to add one last thing that is fascinating to me.  It amazes me to really see first hand how deep our cultures are engrained into us – without us really even knowing it.  I can’t remember exactly what it was that Leo and I were talking about last week but I recall that we both ended the conversation just floored that the other person could not grasp what it was the other was talking about!  It had nothing to do with language barriers – it had everything to do with coming from two different cultures where things are just done so differently!  I could not wrap my brain around what he was saying as a feasible (and “good”) way of doing things nor could he understand why you would want to do it differently then his way!  It was funny and really just showed me that no matter what culture it is you are raised in, you have things inside you that are just purely cultural.  One really isn’t better than the other (although often times “we” think our cultural way is far better) it just has to do with differences.

Anyway, I just thought that you all might find some of those musings interesting!  Blessings!