I mentioned that you switch a lightswitch down to turn on a light here in Beijing. The escalators are reversed - meaning, that you go to the leftmost escalator to go down or up. Ours are usually on the right. They do drive on the same side as us, so I assumed that this would affect escalators, but I guess not.
And in the cars, they have the handles or whatever you call them to make the windows go up and down. You young'uns many not remember them but they pre-dated automatic windows. The thing is you wind it back towards yourself to make the window go down - the opposite of what we used to do when our cars had those types of handles.
I'm pretty sure they're just messing with the West. It's very interesting though.
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15 minutes ago
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I agree, the escalator thing is weird, given that they adopted U.S. road-rules.
But the light-switch thing is common, lots of places in Europe and Australia have down as the "on" position. Also interesting (at least to me it is) is that in Chinese (as in some European languages) you don't turn the light "on" or "off", you "open" or "close" the light.
Which is kind of weird, electrically, when you think about it (which I just did, after many years of not thinking about it) -- an "open" light sort of equates to an "open" circuit, except that an "open" light is lit, while in an "open" electrical circuit, the current will not flow. So that part is definitely "backwards".
You want to know one other really interesting thing about Chinese? They face the past in the Chinese language, while Westerners face the future. Our words for "tomorrow" and "next year" in Chinese translate to "day behind" and "year behind". When I studied Chinese many years ago, it took me a while to figure this out -- they face the past! "Yesterday" in Chinese is "day in front"!
Now THAT's backwards! (Or maybe we are....who am I to say?)
Bob -- I hope that doesn't imply that Twice Cooked Pork is really Half Cooked Pork.
Rich - Uh, no, counting in China works the same way as here :-)
Rich - But, having said that, you'd want to be really careful about eating a dish translated as "Next year's pork"!
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