~May Your Light Shine :D~

Friday, December 28, 2007

I was on the phone with HG yesterday and our conversation suddenly lead to my China trip, which at that point, I began to complain about 2 old folk in our tour group. Now, we ARE Chinese, and we are very clear on how the chinese respects the old because of course they have the most life experience and hence deserve to be given authority over everyone else. But it doesn't give them the power to ABUSE their authority and think that since no one dares to rebuke them(I would, if no one was there to berate me afterwards), they can do whatever they want, act however they like and STILL be correct. Most people would say that, well, they're old, you can't blame them for being like that, but NO. They were 2 of the msot unreasonable, selfish, inconsiderate, impolite old folk I have EVER met. EVER.

What did they do?

Number 1
One of them, a 60+ woman, apparently has walking problems and even though she can walk, she needs to sit on this mini wheelchair(mini because she doesn't need it permanantly and the wheels are smaller than your average sized wheelchair) on long walks in parks or whereever.

Well, my grandmother has walking problems too. And I know, TOO WELL, that old folk with walking problems walk slowly and constantly need people to hold their arm and walk with them, not to mention that when they walk, they walk in the 'crippled' form, which looks VERY unstable and you can really tell that they aren't faking it. That old woman, however, didn't use her wheelchair when we were in some park even though we had to walk a lot. And she was even walking AHEAD of the tour group, in front with the children(including me), without the aid of another person and her walking was PERFECTLY FINE without any 'crippled' form.

THat night when were had to go for dinner and the restaurant was on the 3rd storey, we had no choice but to climb the stairs up because there wasn't an elevator. Even my grandmother whose walking problems seem a 100 times more severe than hers can climb those 3 storeys with the help of others but without trying, the old woman REFUSED to climb the stairs, and REFUSED to be carried, so we had to change our dinner venue to another restaurant even though everyone was starving hungry and tired as it was the 1st day.

On the 2nd day, when we had to view some scenic places, there were cobblestone stairs, maybe about 2 storeys, but this time in the open air. And the old woman couldn't escape this time. So she had to climb the stairs, and guess what? SHe climbed the stiars PERFECTLY NORMALLY. She did it without the aid of others, and even bounced along at some point. To top it off, she was keeping up with the tour group and wasn't even lagging behind. Well, I would like to ask her one question, why did she feign having walking problems if she didn't have any? These cobblestone stairs were with no doubt harder to climb than last night's indoor staircase, so if you could climb these why did you refuse to climb those last night?

Number 2
Whenever the tour guide is introducing a place, or a local product, or telling us some local customs in the tour bus and everyone is really keen on listening because it's so interesting, that old woman and her husband ALWAYS interrupt the guide when she is in mid-sentence, sometimes even in mid-phrase and they never wait for her to finish what she has to say, so most of the time, we're always waiting for the tour guide to finish answering their seemingly useless, unrelated, personal questions and then when she continues to talk to the tour group again, she jumps to a different topic and we all don't know what she had to say earlier.

And when they interrupt, it's not only once or twice, but CONSTANTLY. They seem to think that when the tour guide's talking it's only a conversation between them and the guide and after about 20 minutes of Q&A with the tour guide, and the guide starts talking to the tour group again, they cut in less than a few seconds later! Usually, the tour guide talks for about an hour and leaves the other 2 hours for us to sleep or rest but because of thet inconsiderate impolite couple who have no respect for others whatsoever, the tour guide had to drag her talk to 2 hours, of which 1 hour was used for just answering the couple's personal questions, and our parents couldn't get the sleep they wanted as they had to finish listening to the guide's talk to get vital information.

Even the adults were pretty pissed with that old couple, and my friend and I kept saying, "Shut up la!" from the back, where we obviously could not be heard. And guess what? When the tour guide had painstakingly finished her talk and asked, "Any questions?", that couple didn't even say a thing! Why couldn't they just ask they questions when the guide had finished talking? Why did they have to spoil the talk for everyone in the group except themselves? Don't they even have a tiny bit of consideration for others? And the sad thing was, their family did nothing to stop them...

Number 3
That old woman's husband, who seems like he's 70+, is a smoker. And I wouldn't mind if he went 10 metres away from the rest of the group and smoked in the open but he always smokes whenever he wants when we're outdoors, even though the tour group is all around him. It's like he deliberately WANTS us to sniff all that disgusting second hand smoke, not to mention that SMELL.

Well, bloke, if you want to give yourself lung cancer then that's fine with me because I can't change your mind, but don't think that others want to die so quickly, much less sniff what you are sniffing. If you want to go smoke, at least be considerate enough to go to a corner where you're away from the tour group and other people and finish your smoking, then come back and rejoin the tour.

He even smoked in an open air restaurant, can you believe it?

Number 4
Well, Yunnan is a place with a high altitude, it's no secret! So when we were in Lijiang, and we were going to go up this mountain where the altitude is about 3000+, the tour guide warned us about all those high-altitude symptoms you get(like headaches, nausea, fatigue-which i got, breathlessness-ditto, but then I 'm always breathless because I have low stamina, dizziness, fainting) because she wanted us to be prepared and told us that if we were weak, we should buy cans of oxygen to suck up there at the mountain just in case. THe guide also told us that some Taiwanese tourists fainted straightaway when they got up there. In addition, she mentioned that it's doesn't matter if you're young or old, because age isn't a factor when it comes to how weak you are at high altitudes.

Because of all this "scary" information about the high-altitude symptoms, that old couple decided not to go up there and wait at the cable car station while their family went up. When we were at the top, some people had a few puffs of oxygen(I didn't need to though) but luckily for our tour group, no one's symptoms were really severe to the point of fainting, including that old couple's family.

When we got down the the cable car station after coming down the mountain, the old couple heard from their family that they didn't encounter any major high-altitude symptoms. So the couple, being unreasonable, went to scold the tour guide for exaggerating the symptoms of high altitude, when their family didn't suffer from any, and hence "influencing" them to NOT go up the mountain, when their family did not get any severe problems.

Firstly, the tour guide was NOT exaggerating, she was telling the truth and preparing us for the worst, and also doing her job in warning us about it beforehand. Is that a crime?

Secondly, the couple refused to go up of their own, PERSONAL, choice. No one influenced them. The tour guide let everyone decide for themselves. While their family members decided to take the risk by going up, they were too cowardly to. They cam blame no one else but themselves.

If I wasn't with my family friends, I would have gone up to them, scolded them, and told the tour guide to ignore whatever they said.

See? Even though the older generation can scold us teenagers for being havoc-y and undisciplined and disobedient, I doubt they themselves are any better. Typical Singaporeans.

If you can't practise what you preach, then don't preach at all. No one will listen to you anyway. And I won't give you respect if you don't deserve any.

My Kitchen blogged at Friday, December 28, 2007

May your light shine...
in the darkness...