My diet is a lot healthier here. There is no pizza, sirloin steak or Ben and Jerry's. No Cheetos, no Taco Bell. We do have a McDonald's, a KFC and a Pizza Hut, but they are very different. I have never liked McDonald's, I've always been more of a Burger King guy. The Pizza Hut stuff here is weird, kind of like if someone used Google translator to instruct someone how to make pizza into German, then into Armenian, then into Mandarin. KFC has always been some kind of foreign food to me. I feel no culinary siren song coming from these places, so I don't frequent them.
What I loved in America and they do not have is good pizza, Mexican food, micro brews, cheese, good beef steaks, butter, tortilla chips, sour cream, and fatty ice cream. This is the yummy crap I no longer have ready access to. I eat fresh veggies, fruit, rice, noodles, smaller meat portions, pastries with a lot less sugar and fat, tofu and sea food. There just isn't a lot of fat or sugar in my diet any more.
I also don't drive anywhere any more. Not very many people do. I take the bus, a cab or a sanmo. That means you have to walk a lot. The result is that I am at that ideal weight that they have in the doctor's office charts, but that most Americans can't seem to meet.
It also means that things take longer. Which means that your life slows down. When you look at a Chinese street, it appears to be anything but slow. There are a bazillion vehicles and pedestrians moving all at once. But a closer look reveals everyone moving rather cautiously, but with horns a blazing. Since traffic rules are only a vague suggestion, most people are concentrating on not colliding with the people meandering around them. It's crowded, and you don't have any control over how quickly the flow is moving. You can't be in too much of a hurry or your head would explode from frustration.
I used to micro manage the time it took to get things done so that I could be efficient in everything that I did. Now I allow extra time for transportation. If the bus shows up right after I get to the stop and I arrive at my destination early, I don't feel the overwhelming compulsion I once had to fill the extra time with something. I can just think of stuff,. you know daydream, or plan something, or just watch the weird stuff going on. There is always weird stuff. It's China.
