The Post Office

This past week I had to go to the post office in my neighborhood to send a package home. I have been to the post office quite a few times since I've been in China, but decided to document this visit. The package I was sending was actually for one of my colleagues who can't speak Chinese, and who hadn't been to the post office before. She was sending scarves and some food back home. Its interesting, and you can see from the video, everything was OK to send home except this small package of shrunk wrapped chicken feet(a Chinese specialty...). They removed the chicken feet and allowed me to send other food items, such as a chocolate bar. Its also interesting to watch the Chinese write...you can see a man putting an address on a box, and I marvel at how quickly they move through the strokes of their written language. I still can't read or write Chinese, and with over 10000 separate characters(kind of like our letters)I don't know how anyone ever does. It has been shown that it takes Chinese schoolchildren almost an extra year to two years to reach the same level of written fluency as western culture...and this is mainly attributable to the difficulty of the written language.