I have always been one to spit, or to cough up phlegm and then spit it out. People think I do this because I’m learning from the Chinese but really I’ve always done this.
In Hong Kong, it’s illegal to spit on the ground. “You will get a penalty!” my friend warned me. A penalty I guess is like a ticket. 1500 Hong Kong Dollars ($150) to be exact.
Also, I’m a bit of a litterbug when it comes to small things: cigarettes, wrappers, etc. In China the ground is your trashcan, in Hong Kong they take a similar stance to spitting, although there are trashcans everywhere with messages like “Love Our City!”.
If you’re eating something with shells or bones, in China they go on the ground. I would imagine you’d get thrown out of a restaurant in the US for this but really it’s easier for them to hire someone low waged to sweep it all up than to have waiters clean all the tables.
Walk around late at night on a busy street in a city in China and it looks like hell: shells, bones, lettuce, broken Tsingtao bottles, noodles, rice, misc rubbish, etc. By morning it’s as clean as a whistle. A dirty, smelly, chinese made whistle. But it looks clean!
I like this sort of thing.
Of course the seafood areas reek like seafood because it has so permeated the streets and sidewalks, but shouldn’t seafood areas smell like seafood?
