While buying breakfast, something shocked me, a toddler took the streets as his toilet. The parents, which are the owners of the stall which I bought my breakfast from, simply just took a spade out, and covered the dump with sand. Just when I thought that Shanghai was very similar to Singapore, I was proven to be wrong. The boy was not taught to look for a toilet, but to find a spot to settle it, like in rural areas.
Further down the road, I see an opened garbage dump, with garbage left to rot in the heat. I was so shocked to see such a sight, Shanghai is considered to be one of the better states, yet such sights appear, and to think that things couldn't get any worse, later in the day, I saw a beggar with open wounds, a female peddler on the street breastfeeding her child, a man ran sacking garbage bins for anything he can salvage.
I have never seen such sight in flesh, it has affected me far worse than anything heartbreaking sights in Singapore. I never felt so fortunate in my life, with a healthy body, a good education and life ahead of me. And it still stood when I was chatting with Ms Tay and my life story came up.
Another cultural shock was, in Shanghai, the people here are rather, put bluntly mean. I saw a lady arguing with a couple at the ticketing machine while waiting to buy my subway ticket, a man hitting his girlfriend and asking her to stop shopping and get moving, a motorist shouted at a lady for getting into his way, and all the random stranger who just shoved me aside instead of saying, 'Jie Guo' or 'excuse me'.
This made me saw the impact of Singapore's kindness movement, it DOES make a difference! The power of such initiative can go a long way!
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