China: Living or Visiting ?

China is the land of novelty and contradictions. Even as a Chinese born and bred, I cannot totally define what this country is really like. As a traveler, you may be obsessed with the delicious food or feel the culture-shock in a few days. There will be the highs and lows in terms of your experiences. Living there or traveling there will definitely bring you varied feelings and thoughts.

When you first come to China as a traveler, you may feel your life inconvenience with blocked websites such as Google and Facebook. However, people living in China for a long time seldom care about the censorship problems. Chinese people have their own networks, such as WeChat (for Facebook) and Baidu (for Google). Also, there are always ways to around. For instance, using VPN (Virtual Private Network) will help you out if you stick to access some foreign websites.

For Chinese residents, meals are shared affairs. People love to sit around the table, share their food and communicate with each other. Having lunch or dinner is more than a private chore, but is an enjoyable break from work or classes, interacting with people around. Lunchtime is usually around noon and Chinese customarily takes a nap after it.  It’s easy to find a regular meal in China but it may be hard for a traveler to feel the dining cultures and atmosphere behind it.

With 32 provinces and 56 ethnic groups, Chinese dishes varied a lot, from the hot and chili dishes of Sichuan to the mild and sweet Cantonese Cuisines. As a traveler, you may sincerely love Chinese food with different flavored and still immersed in exploring the new one. Actually, most Chinese are single-minded persons for their hometown taste, which is not easy for them to get used of the food in other regions. People even feel such a close relationship between the specialty regional food and the characteristics of people there. For example, Sichuan girls are supposed to be decisive and enthusiastic because of loving fiery chili dishes. First timers are always fond of searching for those so-called traditional local snacks. whereas, a traveler will never know how delicious the chicken claws, rabbit heads, and sliced pig ears are. Those are all the mouthwatering food for people who live in China.

Of course, no matter for the residents or travelers, the same dish cannot satisfy everyone’s taste. In a huge county with billions of people, you’ll always be in a minority and you’ll never feel the same, in this and anything else. But the unchanged thing is that you can definitely find what you want and have unforgettable memories about something.