Spitting in China

So on our first tour day in China, the first tourist destination we hit was The Summer Palace.  While we were there, we got to see the Giant Rubber Duck, which was on display in the lake for National Day, October 1.

Our tour guide, Bryan (like Adams) at the Summer Palace in front of the Giant Rubber Duck.

As we left there to go get back on the bus, we were walking down the street when someone nearby stopped, held one finger up to one nostril, and blew a great wad of snot onto the sidewalk.

I gotta tell you, I was kinda surprised.  Someone in our group said, "Farmer's blow!"

That was the first I really saw of spitting in China, but then we saw it everywhere.

And I do mean everywhere.  In every city, and every stop we made, people were hocking up loogies and spitting them to the side no matter where we were.  And once you noticed it, you saw it all the time.

With somewhere north of 20 million people in Beijing, that's a lot of loogies.  There's a constant audible undercurrent of Auuuch-ch-ch!

At Tienanmen Square, there were a number of sidewalk scrapers whose job was to keep the entire public square clean.  They would occasionally stop an stoop down and, using a little metal scraper, meticulously scrape at the ground to clean it.

At first I thought it was gum they were scraping, but it could have been dried loogies.  The thought shudders me.