Glenda’s personal journal…
I’m sure the trip was a fruitful one for each and everyone of us. Thanks to the teachers and tour guide for doing up a well organized schedule that thus allowed me to enjoy my trip.
My objectives for the trip are also met. Now, I have a better understanding of the culture in China (positively & negatively), the operation of companies, the challenges faced by foreign companies entering into China, the importance of ‘guan xi’ and making new friends.
A couple of things I will like to mention here…
Hong Kong is almost the same as Singapore in terms of development and stuff, but most of their housings are really old and rundown. As for China, the environment is rather dirty and polluted most of the times. Everybody litters/spits like nobody’s business, like seriously. You know the newspapers placed on the floors at the entrance of the bus for you to sort of clean your shoes? I’ve seen the bus driver kicking down all the newspapers out of the bus to the side of the roads, and off the bus goes… haha I definitely foresee that fines will not work on them at least not for another 10 years or so.
As expected, their toilets are terrible. Stinky toilets with no toilet paper and disgusting wet dirty floor. Thinking about it, I am able to reason out why they only have squat toilets. Because if they do have seated ones, it will usually be too dirty to even be sat on, so what’s the point of having seated ones?
Most of the locals are either very rude or overly friendly which is actually quite scary at times. I mean, how can you possibly expect a customer to buy stuff from your store when the service you provide sucks. It’s like when you ask for the price of an item, some of them will actually expect you to buy after asking for the price and if you do not purchase the item, they will start grumbling and actually scold you. Like what the…But nevermind, I guess that it is probably the way things/people work in China, it’s either get used to it or too bad.
Besides that, I noticed that their signs written in Chinese have the wrong English translation. I do not know if it is because they truly do not know that the translation is wrong or is it because their English literacy ratio is that low. Perhaps out of 10 locals who walk past these erroneous signs, only 1 notices that gratifying mistake. If we were to see those kind of signs in Singapore, you’d think that it’s a commercial gimmick or just a plain old joke. But the thing is, in China it’s actually a ‘REAL’ sign! So that’s why I think English education is a problem in China, probably because the locals are taught English in a wrong method. The locals are taught word for word but they are not taught how to use the words to form a proper English sentence.
The end.
2 Japanese women. (bottom right) 
Gang of 4.
