Edinburgh in Edinburgh

Two nights ago, kept awake by jetlag, I came upon the blog of my Microsoft friend named Bei-jing. She moved her family to Beijing in 2006, which allowed her to write a post entitled "Beijing in Beijing".

I think I shall name one of my children after a city, so that they can experience this pleasure. If it's a daughter, I'll name her Verona. "Verona in Verona" -- what cadence! Or I may name her Vienna, or Venice.

If it's a son, he gets to be called Frankfurt, or Stuttgart, or Edinburgh.

Anyway, in the blog, Bei-jing discusses cultural surprises from China. It gave me an unquenchable desire to draw up my own list!

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1. Chinese people can be surprisingly out of shape while looking perfectly fit. Over New Year's, my dad and I visited Xi'an, where we climbed up a stone staircase to see Chang Kai-shek's old living quarters.



My dad and I climbed it easily while chatting. Behind us, I heard a female voice say between gasps of breath, "Oh my God! I'm not going to make it. I really need to start exercising. I'm so out of shape."

Conditioned by America, I turned around expecting to see a 250-pound woman walking behind me. Instead, the speaker was a willowy girl, no more than a size two.

I don't understand how it can be that hard to propel 100 pounds of body mass up a single flight of stairs. If I stood behind her and fanned my hand, the gust of wind would carry her up those steps.

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2. I really like the pace of the Chinese courting ritual. It's much slower than American expectations. So sweet!

A Beijing Googler told me a story about being set up on a blind date. He figured out quickly that he wasn't interested in his date from a romantic standpoint. However, when he dropped her off at her apartment, she invited him up to sit for a while, and he accepted.

"Weren't you worried about giving her the wrong impression?" I asked.

"No," he said, "In China, everyone assumes nothing will happen on the first date, so it can be perfectly platonic if I go up to her apartment. I was just being polite."

America is a different story. I held a party earlier this year. One of my female guests, a very pretty girl who models on the side, met one of my male guests, a sometimes bashful engineer. Within fifteen minutes, she'd held hands with him, touched him in other ways, and told him she was going to take him home and [censored for young ears] him.

Granted, this is fast even for America. But I still like the Chinese pacing better.