Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Taiwan anymore

Rewind 2 weeks. Hillary and I (Michelle) boarded a flight from Taipei to Chongqing (重庆) China for our 7 week internship at Ford. We just finished our freshman year of college (Berkely and UPenn), and had spent the past month in Taiwan interning at two other start-ups.

Things we had been warned about China:

• Don't walk alone, you will get kidnapped
• Don't speak out loud, you will get kidnapped
• You are a girl, you will get kidnapped
• You will probably get kidnapped
• Guard your passport; people will try to marry you (wtf?) for your US Citizenship
• People can tell your American just by looking at you
• Don't eat street food, you will die.
• Don't drink the water, you will die.
• Check in with your parents every day or they will think you are dead/kidnapped.

Things we had not been warned about before going to China:

• The dialect here is INCOMPREHENSIBLE
• No one will understand the Chinese you speak and will attempt to speak the dialect when you clearly just spoke using Mandarin
• No one can tell your American until you start speaking English
• When you do speak English they think you are stupid
• People here are kind of rude...and pushy
• Ford will make you take a health test at the shoddiest hospital where you might contact AIDS from the questionable needle used to draw your blood
• There are coins and bills for 5 cents and 1 cent
• EVERYTHING HAS CHILI PEPPERS IN THEM

To put in kinder words, we had a bit of "culture shock" when we arrived in China. Our biggest challenge has been finding food to eat (menus are hard to read and everything is really spicy or unclean), and we quickly determined the quality of our days is determined by the quality of the food we could find. So enjoy watching our "amusing" food log and  our attempt at trying to survive and enjoy our time here, among other interesting experiences we've had so far in the past two weeks.


DISCLAIMER: As salty as we sound we are not trying to insult anyone or anyone's culture, we are just two hungry interns trying to navigate our way through China. Our families come from Taiwan and this is our first time in China so we are simply adjusting to a bigger culture shock than we expected. We are not extrapolating our experiences here upon China or Chinese people in general, just recording our amusing predicaments. We promise we're trying our best to enjoy China.