Chapter one: China and me
My first visit to China was in 2001 summer. My old Aeon teacher moved to Shanghai and he invited me there. It was my first experience to go abroad.
I have had no idea about foreign trips. At first I had to get my passport. I had known that I needed a kind of license card, to go out of Japan. But I didn't know the difference of meaning between a passport and a visa. And, at that time we needed a visa to go to China. Moreover, I didn't know that I had to buy a flight ticket in addition to the passport.
When I get on a train, I buy only a ticket. But, I had to think about a triangle of passport, visa and flight ticket on the China trip. I was very confused and thought that this system was very inconvenient.
It was lucky that Aeon staff Ms.Y had worked for a travel company before.
She was kind to arrange my flight. The complexity above was solved automatically.
Before going to China, I had bought a guide book. But I didn't read that book so much. Because I didn't like to get together much information about the place I would go to. We shouldn't lose the surprises in a trip. So, I can't understand why so many tour guide books are published. And for same reason, I don't like maps. One of my least favorite corners in a book store is guide book and map corner. They are very boring. Mathematics book corner is less boring for me than them.
I compared China with Japan for 7 days during my stay. Some points were same. Some points were different. But the differences were not big. In Shanghai, people's life in 2001 were already Westernised and Japanised to some extent. They had McDonald, KFC, Sturbucks, Yoshinoya, convenience stores, TV game shops and so on. I didn't feel any inconvenience there. And their original life style and mentality were same as Japanese. They didn't wear shoes in a room. They ate rice and vegetable very much. They were shy but kind to a stranger. When they felt confused, they tended to smile.
I have never been to Korea. But maybe their life style and mentality are same like Chinese and Japanese. We have the same roots. Then, we can be easily combined.
The countries in East Asia can be closer.
However, there is a well-known difficult problem among us.
