fiefoe

Peter Hessler was very much a stranger in a strange land.

This was one reason why we were so often incorporated into local events: it was a simple way to make sure people watched.
When I was writing my composition, someone shouted at the classes: `Pete and Adam are playing Frisbee!' At once, I put down my pen and rushed out the classroom. Really, they are! I wanted to see it clearly and didn't want to miss any scene. I ran into the classroom and put the glasses on my nose, then dashed to the classroom again. I can see it clearly now!... Foreigners are so versatile.
I often heard remarks like this, and they suggested that the Chinese saw their landscapes differently than outsiders did... the Chinese looked at the people and saw how they had been shaped by the land.
To live as a waiguoren required a certain passivity,
Sichuanese slurs the Mandarin reflexive sounds - sh becomes s, zh becomes z - and certain consonants are reversed, so that the average person in Sichuan confuses n and l , and h and f. A word like "Hunan" becomes "Fulan." The Sichuanese tonal range is also shorter, and most significant, two of the four Mandarin tones are reversed in Sichuan.
They were pictures rather than words: I would look at 卡, and think of K-mart... 大 looked like a man doing jumping jacks. 点 was a marching spider carrying a flag across the page.

His survey:

At night all of the flaws disappeared. It was only water and lights - the brilliant lights and the dark water, the deep black mirror of the Wu River streaked with red and yellow and white. Sometimes a night boat slipped upriver, steadily pushing a triangle of light ahead of its prow, the motor coughcoughcoughing in the darkness of the valley. And every half hour or so there would be a big passenger boat on the Yangtze, a bright band of lights floating past in majestic silence.
Sometimes a peasant will stop to have his tooth pulled, after haggling over the price, and a crowd will gather to watch. Everything is public. A haircut comes with an audience.
As the dry season begins in late autumn, the river shifts from brown to gray to deep blue-green, until at last in winter it stretches like a narrow band of jade scratched white by the rapids.
a vast thoughtless sky
The next morning I climbed the Bella Tola. It was early summer and the mountain was still snow-covered, and the ice was streaked red with Sahara sand that had been blown across the Mediterranean by the föhn winds. {Ok, this's in Switzerland.}

"River Town"