Last Day

This was our last day here in China and I would like to write about a few main observations that I have noticed over the last four weeks.

 The people here have been great to us.  From the people that we just met on the street to our friends at the university, everyone has been so kind.  I can not think of one bad moment in the whole trip where I felt that we haven't been treated fairly.  If anything, the people have treated us better probably better than we really deserve.  People sometimes would go out of their way to try and impress us.  An example of this is when we wanted to play table tennis and badminton at the university and we somehow met a high school student whose father works at the university.  He went way out of his way to try and reserve the room for us to play when we wanted to.  We ended up talking for at least 20 minutes and the whole time he was determined to get the room reserved for us. 

 The view of Americans seems a lot better here in China than other places around the world.  It seems like people like to see us in China, they want to learn more about us, and they don't have any negative things to say to our face.  When in Europe it seemed to be the opposite as people didn't really care about us and sometime I would hear some shallow comments about us because of our president at the time.

 Even though looking at the traffic and crossing the street feels so unsafe, I almost feel safer than I do at home.  I feel that even though they don't follow the rules as much and the roads are more chaotic, people watch out for each other more and are always willing to stop for others.  I might have just gotten used to this over the past four weeks, but I seriously felt very safe crossing the street and driving in cars.  We were in a taxi last night and it felt like I was on a racetrack.  None of us had seatbelts on but I didn't even worry about it.  At home I would have been so scared and would have buckled my seat belt immediately.  I feel like at home drivers feel that if you are in the way, it is your fault and you are reliable for yourself. 

 These are just some of the differences I have noticed. I could spend all day writing about the differences between the two countries.  I had a great time and I am already missing some of the small things about China.