Welcome to Chinese

Or something like that...

Welcome to Guangzhou, the City of Flowers.

One of the things you forget about China is that it frequently and unexpectedly smells like raw sewage. And never anywhere that makes sense. You'll be walking along the street in the most affluent corner of the city, and then bam... raw sewage. This happens frequently. It's worse than Beijing, which was smelly.
The humidity is so high that the air feels dense and nearly solid. So at least once a day, every day you will feel like you are walking through a sewer, hip deep in feces (which by the way is the QE spelling, the AE spelling is faeces... who knew?). The worst part is: this never happens at the same place, it's always somewhere new. That shit never strikes the same place twice... like lightning.

So they call it "The City Of Flowers"

I am beginning to suspect that some chinese do possess a sense of irony.

Don't get me wrong, ninja-like shit smells are one of the things I love about this place. It's just another one of those things that makes you smile, shake your head, think to yourself: "Oh China, how I love thee," and then hold your breath for five paces.


One of the things you will notice about foreigners is that there is a sense of kinship that develops almost immediately. No doubt it has something to do with the fact that we all kinda stand out and usually above everyone else, but I think there's something else to it too. In order to truely love China, and to be able to spend any length of time here, you need to have a finely developed sense of the absurd. Like the example above.
The characteristic portrait of an expat in China: male, under 35, whip smart, educated, slightly dishevelled with a slight flavour of pirate or highwayman... something illicite and dangerous but still quite appealing. So I'm not talking about those guys in suits: well dressed, well groomed who take cabs everywhere and live in one of the affluent white ghettos on the outskirts of town, just the ones who live closer to the centre, who all know each other and all share that finely developed sense of the absurd.
I think the reason that some of the best and brightest Millenials (b. 1979-1991) I have ever met are here and not in the West - and the source of the deep sense of kinship - is because we couldn't quite hack it back home. I get the sense that most of us were viewed at home as oddities, savants and prodigies of one kind or another. But it's more than just that, we could have run away to somewhere other than China, yet we ended up here by accident or design, and will stay because our sense of absurdity may just be a little too finely developed.


Sartre would have loved this place