Nanjing

Wider, less rugged, friendlier by far than Shanghai, twice the capital of China, the city was occupied by Japanese forces before World War II, becoming the site of an infamous six week massacre, the subject of Iris Changs book The Rape of Nanking. Now is not the time to accidentally slip into Japanese.

At the memorial hall a man, clearly old enough to at least have been a young boy at the time of the massacre, idly wandering through the exhibits, hacked up a huge ball of phlegm, and leisurely spat it out in a cushion of saliva. It landed with a resonant splat, punctuating the pre-recorded machine-gun fire. His manner declared that this was by no means a gesture of contempt, rather of necessity. Not a minute later, he lit up a fag and had to be scolded by a security guard.

This "I-don't-give-a-damn" attitude is something that's struck me particularly hard since coming here. People openly stare at us, blatantly laugh at our （admittedly hilarious） attempts to communicate, queues are formed seemingly by coincidence, the streets are littered with fag butts, bags, phlegm wads, traffic lights are all but ignored, horns are honked at the slightest provocation or appear to be essential to the running of the vehicle, waiters and waitresses seem openly put out that they should have to do anything at all...it's quite refreshing in an odd way, and certainly an enviable attitude to bear. Could this charging confidence be the result of over 3000 years of continuous civilisation?

Recently I've been thinking about a man I once served in the Library. A Chinese student ignored the orderly line in front of the issue desk and went straight to the first vacant booth she saw. The man called after her
"We have a little system in this country called queueing."
I keep wondering how long he'd last here.