Hello again,

Anyone who had been in China and many other Asian countries has probably realized that keeping something clean is not their strength. Especially when it comes to the exterior of buildings and also much of the more public interior such as the stairways, lifts etc. Sometimes it is even that dirty and in such a desolate condition that you might think that the building must be near hundred years old even though it is standing there only for a few years.

However this is nothing compared to how the windows are taken care of. In hotels you might try to watch out of your window but then you see…nothing! Ok, you see something and that is grey or brown, sometimes even oily blackish,  depending on the area and their industry. Chinese seem to avoid to clean windows at all cost.

In a restaurant I saw once how they cleaned their front window (the side facing the street). So what they did was to put newspaper in water and wipe the windows with those newspapers. Needles to say, the window appeared to be more dirty afterwards than it was in the beginning…

So when we had my wife’s parents over here in the “western” world they noticed that the windows are actually clean. Very often it happened that we went through the streets and my mom in law pointed out the clean windows. She asked then “Why are the windows so clean? Special glass?” oh well oh well, sure they know something about how to clean windows but it seems its more a task they do every decade or so.

On a side note, they really seem not to know too much about cleaning equipment for windows. In a store they had some window wipers and my dad in law wanted to buy one of those to use it as a floor wiper in the bathroom.

Again my question, is this normal? Is it depending on the city or area the people come from? Or are they just joking around and I just miss the hint? 😮