Life and Travel in China

Shenzhen is a pathetic city and the local government has no idea how to promote this metropolis. They organized a Fashion Show (clothing fair). You could count the number of foreigners on your fingers, but there were crowds of Chinese in the exhibition hall. Of course, admission is paid for everyone, because this city is focused only on money. There are hundreds of companies inside, nothing special. We only saw two rather pathetic fashion shows on the catwalks. The first one bored us with a band, and the second one banned photography and some pathetic porters and people from the factory chased anyone who held a camera in their hand. I decided to spite them a bit and kept aiming at the models (from this point I could only take photos of the heads of the crowd surrounding the catwalk). Of course, one guy quickly ran up, another, a third, and an argument that we couldn't take photos. Why these shows? This Fashion Show? The Chinese have already copied everything from the Italians, the French... and they decided that you can't copy from them.

The funniest thing is that the Chinese themselves can't communicate in their own language, so how can I learn Chinese properly? For example, when asking about something in a hypermarket, or asking for an address, or giving my name, I have to spell it, or rather syllable it. Such a theoretical example (of course, this does not refer to Chinese words, but I mean the same way): RA-DO-SŁAW, RA as in RAMa, DO as in Literally, SŁAW as in SŁAWny. Not only can each syllable have four different accents and completely different meanings, but it can be written in several, sometimes a dozen, ways. And that's why they have to explain it to themselves that RA is as in the word RAMa, and not as in the word RAbarbar.

On Sunday, a group of about 30 people organized a protest at the Shenzhen City Hall. I was just passing by with my camera. Nothing special was happening, security, people waiting for some VIP at the exit gate, no banners, just normal waiting. I guess they wanted to talk to someone. One guy called out to us to take photos. But what? Besides, the security guards were constantly looking at me. I will take photos and then I will have to explain it to the police station for two weeks. Thanks, but I don't get involved in politics. At the end, about 40 policemen showed up. They got into two buses and waited. After 20 minutes, we realized that either the VIP had escaped through another exit or that he would not show up so quickly and we went our separate ways. People waited calmly.

And what happened, gentlemen, censors, that Wikipedia has been unblocked in China for several days? Maybe one of the censors needed to find something for his daughter for school and later forgot to block it :-))).

DID YOU KNOW THAT China has the largest number of mobile phones, currently over 500 million. Moreover, the Chinese are second in the world in terms of using these devices. Calls are cheaper than in Poland, but many tariffs also include charges for incoming calls, including those from abroad. The cost of calls ranges from PLN 0.10 to PLN 0.40 per minute. When using your phone in a different province (than the one where you bought the card) you are charged something like roaming, and some cards previously only worked in a specific province or city. Sometimes I have the impression that Chinese people talk about 30-120 minutes on their cell phones a day. At the same time, Poles who cannot afford telephone calls send hundreds of text messages (we are among the world leaders in this respect).