Thursday, December 6, 2007

I put the Toner on his stomach. Rude Chinese

  • The last two evenings, as an experiment, I have laid the Toner on his stomach to see what he would do and how he would react.  He lifted his head somewhat to look around but after two minutes on his stomach, he complained.
  • We returned to the Notary Public Thursday afternoon to get another copy of a translation of a Toner birth certificate.  The building containing the Notary Public we went to is strange in that you can take an elevator to the fifth floor but you then have to take stairs to the sixth floor.  The office we thought we had to go to was on the sixth floor.  We thought so because we had gone to the office on a previous occasion and got the translation.  So taking Tony in the pram, we had to carry the pram with Tony up one flight of stairs.  It was just our luck that the office we had gone to previously was on the sixth floor.  Thursday afternoon, we were sent down to the fifth floor because the person we dealt with on the previous occasion  working on the sixth floor, was now on the fifth floor.  And so we had to carry the pram down one flight of stairs.  We would have had to carry the pram down if the person we had dealt previously was still working on the sixth floor; but it just goes to show you the slippery Byzantine nature of bureaucracy, especially in China where you can seem to pin down a mandarin's office.  It was carrying down the pram with Tony in it, that a typically Chinese thing occurred.  The wife and I were carrying down the pram, practically being three abreast with the pram in between us.  There was not much room for anyone to pass us.  As we were three stairs from the bottom, three people approached the stairs.  In a  civilized country, all three people would have waited the five seconds it would have taken for us to get to the bottom of the stairs.   But this is China, where no one yields to anyone.  A lady tried to creep around us.  I gave her a shoulder because there was no way I was yielding the ignorant woman space.
  • In China, people don't wait for the elevator to empty before trying to get on it.
  • Earlier, I was pushing the pram through a crosswalk and I made a electric scooter come to a very awkward halt.  This idiot had no intention of yielding right-of-way and was attempting to swerve almost 90 degrees from his path to do so.

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