I still can’t get used to …

… the way many Chinese order at a restaurant, a process that can seem more like a debate. The customer looks over the menu, often a booklet of five or six plastic-encased pages, pausing to ask questions, discussing items with the server, working from front to back, then from back to front, staring, staring, perhaps hoping that if he looks long enough, the menu items will improve or come down in price or something. It’s worth noting: He’s not just ordering a dish for himself but four or five dishes for the entire table, so he wants to get it right.

… the way people walk into the street seemingly oblivious to traffic, confident that if they get to a spot ahead of a car, the spot belongs to them and the car will either stop or, more likely, swerve into another lane, confident that if it gets to a spot in the other lane first, the approaching bus will stop or, more likely, swerve into another lane. Seasoned pedestrians blithely make their way without incident, and the only one who comes close to being killed is me. It’s all timing, I guess.

… buses being driven like bumper cars, as if the idea is to cause elderly people with many bags to go flying.

… the idea that I’m old enough now for elderly people with many bags to decline my seat when it is offered.

That’s it for this edition of “I still can’t get used to …”

Day 1: First impressions of China

Despite the guy with bad breath directly to my right and the occasionally screaming infant one row up, the 14 hours from Chicago to Shanghai seemed to pass rather quickly. Got off the plane just after 2 p.m. Tuesday — 13 hours ahead of Chicago time — and my first thought was: “Looks like planet earth to me.”

In fact, with a few exceptions on the five-hour drive from Shanghai to Yangzhou, where I will teach conversational English at a college, I was struck more by the similarities to my usual surroundings than by the differences. Green highway signs with white lettering. Green, yellow and red traffic lights. Dotted white lines separating lanes, double-yellow line in the middle. Billboards. The most obvious indication of how seriously the Chinese are taking their national push to learn English: All of the road signs, at least around Shanghai, provide directions in both languages.

Jianghai Polytechnic College had sent “Jack” and a driver to pick me up. We hit a couple of major traffic snags, during which I learned that the lanes become pretty much meaningless to drivers here. Jack, whose English was excellent, regaled me with stories and information about Yangzhou, which is apparently known throughout China for just about everything: its wealth, culture, cuisine, history, fried rice, pretty girls. On the way, we stopped for a meal of Peking duck, shrimp, green vegetables of some kind and a soup of fish and pickles. I was being treated more as a guest lecturer than as a teacher in the American sense.

It was night when we finally arrived — and quite a moment when I rode for the first time through the entrance pictured at the top of this blog. The man who hired me, Mr. Chen, awaited and showed me to the small one-bedroom apartment being provided rent-free by the school — sort of a cross between a nice hotel room and a college dorm room.

The challenges are only beginning. I managed to get one temperature in the shower that is virtually on top of the toilet — scalding — so I took my first bottled-water shower. Gotta adapt. It’s a new reality.