Hello China: Chinese cultural facts (3)

Hello :)

Last week, I had a conversation class with my students and we talked about press! I wanted to make it easy so at first I started my class asking them “ok guys, who can tell me something about recent news in China?” and no kidding, this is what they replied to me.

1^st student: I don’t know if you heard about it but last month, 4 bridges in China fell down and we don’t know why. It was in 4 different cities, maybe the construction was not that good but they fell down while cars were passing on.

2^nd student : Last week in Wuhan, there had been a bus accident. You know we have some tall buses with two floors, the driver of one of these buses decided to take a shortcut but on his way there was a tunnel. He thought the high would be ok but the bus was too tall and it crashed against the tunnel. ==> Don't take this kind of bus anymore Blandine.

3^rd student : Two weeks ago, there was a huge crash between two trains in Hubei province! (The province where Wuhan is). They were going in the same direction but one of the trains was going slowly while the second one was very fast so finally the second one reached the back of the first one and they crashed… è Neither the trains Blandine.

Honestly at one point it started to be funny because they realized what they were saying, especially when I repeated “I asked for news, not especially BAD news but news in general, ok?”
Anyway I share the story with you because I think it says a lot about Chinese transport conditions here. You have so so so many accidents here, it’s crazy.

Afterwards I asked them to make a newspaper article in French and some students from both sexe made something about “7 qualities the perfect guy needs to have”. That was hilarious because first…man needs to have a lot of money. I loved that :D He needs to be handsome and to be nice to girls, to be talkative and funny, to do sport and to buy things to the girls. Well and the interesting part of the story was when I asked “and what are the qualities to make a perfect woman” and I found out that in China, you can take an extra class when you are at the university and this class teaches you how to be a good wife. You learn how to be feminine, how to behave in front of men, how to dress, how to cook, how to sew and blahblahblah. And it’s good for a woman when she says she studied this course.

Finally, I asked what is the most important thing that people seek in a man/ woman è “he needs to have a good job to feed the family and she needs to be able to care about the family, her children, her parents and his parents” è unanimous agreement and they are all between 19 and 28.

And after they remind me that in China, you have more guys than girls because of the only child law and because of that hundreds of thousands of Chinese people won’t be able to marry women. In poor countryside, many men come and buy wives from the girls' parents without asking the girls' permission, to marry and create a family is what the chinese people focus on. Oh and in China, homosexuality is really widespread among people, men should marry a woman because of their parents but as long as they don’t show off they can be both side and you have an incredible number of gay websites, gay bars and gay nightclubs in China, just in Wuhan there are a lot.

Ok and to conclude, I went to a “food district” in Wuhan, I don’t know how to explain in fact. It’s just a district where you have food everywhere and it’s really typical, I thought you might like to see it so I made some videos… Here they are, thanks to youtube which allows me to share them online! J Hope you will enjoy it, I did my best but I am definitely not a reporter J