Today turned out to be a lovely hot sunny day, so I decided to go do some swimming in the pool. Don’t worry, I don’t smell like chlorine now — there’s not a drop of chlorine in that pool. And I know it’s not a salt water filtration system. But I do know that every day after school there’s about 50 kids playing in it. Gross!

Anyway, thinking about that made me think about one of the things I hated about China. Spitting. People are always spitting there, everywhere, no matter where you are walking, there is someone spitting. And they don’t even do it a cool way – you know, where you shoot it out of your mouth like a bullet straight to the ground. No, you’ll see these ugly old grammas just bent over, letting the spit slowly ooze out of their mouths; making a long trail of glob hanging from their mouth. Finally they’ll release it with a ptthhhh. It’s totally disgusting.

So the reason this has to do with swimming is that once I went to a public pool in China with my friend and I was taking a rest between laps and I noticed people spitting into the grate around the edge of the pool. They didn’t realize, or probably more accurately — care — that this water gets recycled back into the pool. It was just like a sink to them, for them to spit up in. No class. Absolutely NO class.

I also remember being at the beach and trying to have a nice swim in the water, but noticing that everyone around me was hacking up giant globs and just spitting them out into the water. No class…

China sucks.