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Q: Whats the dumbest thing youve ever seen a local do?
Guangzhou Metro, waiting in line to buy a token. The machine is flashing big bright letters " No bills, coins only" Dude tries a bill, doesnt work, tries again. Im 3 people back watching and waiting for the moron. He gets mad and tries again. I help him. He spends ten minutes looking for coins then screws off. Next lady in line. Tries a damn bill. I couldnt beleive it, like 4 times, she cant figure this out.
I get pissed, say cant you read? Theres huge ass flashing letters right in eye level. No Bills! She screws off.
The lady in front of me..I kid you not. tries a damn bill. I lost my shit. Maybe i could understand if they were playing with their phones like usual but nope, they where all standing there getting mad at the first guy. I cant beleive these people.
2 months ago the highway from guangzhou to shenzhen. trying to take the offramp and change highways... the single lane offramp... Cant. Why? A huge damn truck has decided hes going to drive up the on ramp ....going the wrong way!!!!! Think about this... How is that even possible? How do you go you go the wrong way on a highway off ramp. His lane was a good 600 meters away with the highway baracade blocking him. Did he go on the highway and turn around after missing his exit?
After passing him i went on the highway and it was a good 6 or 7 km till the next exit. He drove against oncoming traffic for 6 km on the G4 major highway then up the single lane offramp into oncoming traffic. What was his plan? There was no way to go! He would have had to do this at least another 10 K..
The good thing was, this was the first time I have ever seen the police do their jobs, man they were pissed.
Anyways, no generalizations. Something you have seen that was so stupid you couldnt even get mad, just laugh and say WTF????
I don't know about dumbest but this week I saw something both weird and disturbing; a woman of about 80, squatted down on her haunches in front of a makeshift fire she'd obviously just knocked up, and in her hands was a small cage with a live rat in it that she was slowly roasting over the fire. Now THAT, is some f***ed up s**t. And oh yeh, just remembered something that you could describe as pretty damn dumb; a playground full of kids doing morning exercises to an old old recording that, as God is my witness, was repeating in Chinese "Protect your eyes for the revolution" over and over again.
Robk:
Ah yes, the morning exercise music at Chinese schools.
They are probably the best way to transport yourself back to Nazi Germany.
It reminds me of that so much and I obviously wasn't even there.
The stupidest thing I have seen is something we see every day.
The mother on her ebike, cutting across a roundabout between lorries... with her precious offspring perched precariously behind her.
Nothing. I've frequently seen locals do nothing when an action would be warranted. They just stand/sit there like a bag of sand. It's kinda dumb.
Sorry I think I've been here too long, all the dumb shit I could have recited from the early days is a distant memory and anything that happens now kinda seems normal!
Not the dumbest, just the most recent. Five minutes ago went out to buy some chicken and one of the staff came over bursting with delight and enquired with a wholly unwarranted amount of enthusiasm whether I intended to eat the chicken I was buying. What can I say? Yeh. I'm gonna eat the chicken.
And I come off looking the grump because I fail to share her enthusiasm.
F**k.
I guess I envy someone who can find joy in something so mundane, but I can't. I just can't. I mean, if the chicken she brought over was dressed in a tux and wearing one of those false arrow things through its head, then yeh, i'd have probably got into the spirit of the whole, 'How bizarrres is THIS situation!?' thing that seemed to be going on in her head. I may have even treated her to my Groucho impression "I don't know if I should eat it or take it dancing. Waddaya want from me, a banana? Wakawakawakawaka" (Yeh, I don't know what stuff Groucho used to say). But it wasn't wearing a tux. No, it wasn't. No tux. No arrow. Just - a - f***ing - chicken.
Sigh.
Today, I was at one of those supermarkets in the basement of a department store. I saw a woman trying to push her shopping cart(trolley) up an escalator and out into the dept store. When the employees tried to stop her, inevitably, an argument ensued. The kicker, though, is that she only had one head of cabbage in the cart. Ah, the things one sees here.
One of the Chinese English teachers at my school ordered one of his students to stand in the hallway all day long while adopting the Usain Bolt stance and wearing a sign around his neck that said he, and his family, were low life scum.
The reason? He hadn't done his homework.
Could this result in a negative emotional/psychological outcome for the poor kid? Well, of course. But for a Chinese school student? Don't know.
In any case, I told the teacher that what he was doing to the kid would be unacceptable in any normal country and was just plain stupid. Nevertheless, the kid stood there mimicking Usain Bolt for hours.
