List of thigs we learned in China

1. Doctors are not very trusted or well paid.  Doctors only make average wages and make most of thier money by working with pharmacies and getting kickbacks on the medications they perscribe.
   
2. The forbidden city only took 16 years to buid.
   
3. People need to have 30% down on a house.  Beijing is quite expensive.  Many older people rent rooms in thier houses to the young and live off the income of the rent.
   
4. China has huge tariffs on imported goods.  Chinese goods however are quite cheap.  Therefore, you see mostly chinese cars and such forth.  If someone wants a non chinese items it is usually easier to go to a place like Korea and bring it back (AKA like cell phones)
   
5. Google, youtube and facebook are all banned in china.  However, many chinese use VPNs to get around it.
   
6. There is no income tax.  Companies take taxes directly out of paychecks monthly if you make more than 3,000 yuan ($441 USD).
   
7. Most of china does not take foreign credit cards (with the exception of very touristy areas).  Instead, chinese have a credit card form the goverment, to try to keep the money in country
   
8. The chinese flag has symbology: the large star is the comnunist party and the 4 small stars represent the public supporting the party.
   
9. Cars and traffic: there are seperate car models like in NZ. traffic is hectic, but more ordered than I thought. there is a crazy mix of pedestrians, bikes, mopeds (no licence needed) and rickshaws. every road also seems to have 2-3 lanes of main road, and parallet to that is 1 lane for local traffic, bikes and mopeds to the rightmost lanes. they drive on the "correct" side of the road.
   
10. you can only drive cars with certain license plates on certain days in order to reduce traffic and congestions
    
11. you can only buy a car in beijing if you have a beijing ID card
    
12. how do you get a drivers license in china? you have to enter a lottery to buy a license plate, once you get the license you have to pay a 'fee' usually 10,000-25,000 yuan ($2500).
    
13. although the country is spread across 5 time zones, they all follow one time zone, Beijing Time.
    
14. China's younger people don't want to work in factories anymore, and want IT/office jobs and want to only work 40 hours a week. so they are  shipping the jobs that they don't want to do into pakistan and india.
    
15. Travel: in order to cut down on people becoming illegal aliens in other countries like USA and NZ, to go and visit you have to put down 50,000Y to get a visa so you wont go to NZ and just camp out. Also you have to go with a tour group, you cannot backpack by yourself.
    
16. Guns are outlawed, police dont have guns, but there are armed soldies with machine guns that walk around infrequently.
    
17. parking lot monitors EVERYWHERE!
    
18. People trying to sell you things everywhere
    
19. lots of police "blue uniforms" and soldiers "green uniforms" throughout the city : only tasers 
20. if you are driving and you get caught by the speed camera, you get $200 fine and three hours to leave the city, if you don't leave, then you get another ticket!
    
21. uber is illegal in china
    
22. instead of just one beltway, one big highway loop around the city, there are 6 loops (or Ring Roads) aound beijing.
    
23. trash: every day. bury or burn the trash in the community, no centralized dump.
    
24. no recycling, even if there are "recycling bins", the trash collectors put it in the same communal bin. So recycling in china is mainly just for show.
    
25. Drum Tower and Bell Tower to tell time, Bell tower rings once every hour from 1am until 12 noon, then a seperate drum tower starts tolling every hour until midnight. Any "big" city in ancient China had a Drum and Bell Tower. 
26. A lot of the apartment buildings dont have any central heat, no double pane windows/insulation
    
27. our tour guide goes home to inner mongolia like a lot of the villagers. he has to take the train 28 hours to his village. The train was so crowded that in 2013 he had to stand the entire time. he even had to go to the bathroom in front of 3 other guys because they didnt want to give up their "seat" in the bathroom.