This is the bathroom that I shared with two other guys for a few weeks in China. See that hole in the floor? That’s the toilet a.k.a. “squatty potty”.

AND the shower drain.

Yes, that’s right. The bathroom is best described as a large tiled shower with the addition of a squatty potty into which the sink and shower drained. Oh, and how could I forget that aptly-named “wastepaper basket” where all the used toilet paper goes. (We quickly learned not to get it wet when showering, dirty toilet paper smells less when it’s dry.)

That wasn’t the only thing that was “different” about our hotel… We ended up spending a lot of time praying for the owners, employees and err… “guests”. You see, many people wouldn’t stay a full night in their room. TVs blaring at their highest volumes couldn’t quite drown out the sounds of the other “guests”. It didn’t take us long to figure out what was going on… Though the hotel wasn’t quite a brothel it wasn’t just a hotel either. It was something in-between.

Eating was fun, too! The most popular meal in the area we stayed in is called Hot Pot. It’s generally something you have with a big group of friends no more then once a week. As you can see from the picture (above) which I took during a meal with some Chinese students, there is a big boiling pot of oil with chilies, peppers and spices in it and then lots of little plates with various kinds of food for you to put in the pot and cook. The pot in this picture is divided into two kinds of Hot Pot, one is the traditional spicy kind (the red side) and the other is a much more mild kind (the yellow side). The food on the plates includes small hard-boiled eggs, cow stomach, meat from the pig, “glass meat” (marbled beef), another plate of “glass meat”, more glass meat and pig brain among other things.

To be perfectly honest all the strange things weren’t as bad as you’d expect. I even enjoyed the cow stomach. (Not nearly as much as a nice medium-rare steak though!)

Something else that took getting used to was the crowds of people. Asian culture is group culture and you can see evidence of it everywhere in China. For instance, there are no suburbs in China. There are farms and very remote rural areas and then there are cities. Mega-cities with millions and millions of people… and they’re not “mega” because there’s no room for smaller cities, it’s because they like to group together.

We were out in western China and many of those people have never seen Caucasians in person before. (All of them have seen white foreigners on TV.) When we were spotted it was not uncommon for people to gather around us and just stare. It was weird and annoying at first but eventually we got used to it.

Our last week in China was spent in Beijing and we were able to go see many of the “sights” that most tourists visit, like the Temple of Heaven (above). They were incredible and some (like the “god of fear”) were very telling.

While the sights were very impressive, it was in living among and talking with the Chinese people in western China that I learned, grew and was most challenged.