China - first impressions

First thing that I liked in China was that there was a smiley face on the sidebar of the luggage trolley in the Shanghai airport. Also, when passing through security, I was asked to stand for a pet down, and there were these foot shaped suns with a smiley face to indicate where to place my feet.. Theres really no need for those smiley faces but I thought they were a nice touch

If I had any doubts that China was gonna take over the world, they have now vanished. This shit is on another scale!! Hong Kong is basically a gigantic mall. Each building is bigger than the next and they all look like something out of Star Wars. Also, they all connect wth each other in this intricate system of walkways, so that youre just going from building to building without ever touching the street..and all these walkways and building lobbys and metro stops are all malls. Every building has a shopping mall, theres simply not a single inch without some sort of store...theres even escalators in the middle of the street in one of the higher end neighborhoods. Its an amazing city, though I would never want to live there..

Its pretty scary to think how Chinese kids are gonna grow up n this envronment. Today we took the train to Shenzhen which is in mainland China. The immigration line was full of little kids that were also crossing the border. Some of these kids couldnt have been more than 2 or 3 years old, and they were standing there at the immigration couter, all of them standing on their tippy toes holding tere I.D cards..the immigration officer had to stand up to see them. There were hundreds of kids, it was a really cute/funny/creepy thing to see...

The best part so far though has been the endless amount of funny looking Chinese people. Old people are especially great. I have a picture of a really awesome pensive old dude with a hawaiian shirt on. I also had lunch with some really quirky characters yesterday. I went to eat with an English dude that I met at one of the tourist attractions, and when we got to the restaurant we were seated at the same table as three Chinese people who were already having their lunch! Even though there wre empty tables, the waitress sat us down with them. They didnt speak any English so there wasnt really much to say, but I took a good picture.