Anyone who visited China knows that it’s not always so “clean” there. Especially many apartments look so messed up that you might think they were constructed at least half a century ago even though they are only few years old. From this you can see that most Chinese don’t take cleaning and taking care of their things too serious.

However there are also other Chinese specimen, including my nice dad in law. Sometimes I have the feeling that his first priority in life is cleaning, ahead of anything else.

As an example I give you the daily routine of entering the apartment.

Normal Chinese just go into an apartment and keep their shoes on, sometimes change to some slippers.

He on the other hand is “dusting” himself of before entering the apartment, means slapping himself with some special clothes or wet towel, so the dust from the outside is not getting into the apartment.  Then he has the slippers for the apartment which he puts on before entering through the door. Btw, even though those are house slippers they are cleaned daily by him, because of the dust which according to him, falls down the body and makes everything so dirty in the flat.

I don’t go into too much detail about his daily cleaning routine but lets say, its extreme.

But what I noticed about the cleaning: It is all superficial! On the one hand he cleans and cleans and cleans the apartment more if he wouldn’t need sleep and go to work but on the other hand it is mostly pretty useless.

So he might hand-picked every single hair he finds on the floor and clean it at least twice a day but more important things like changing the AC filters and cleaning it from time to time are not happening at all. Also the kitchen, especially the cooking zone, it’s a mess, a war zone. The exhausts hood in so full of oil and other food stuff that its falling constantly down, the cooking plate is full of burned things so that the pots are a bit elevated when cooking…

But then again, I should be probably happy that he is doing something and the apartment looks neat and not like some old dormitory room where you can’t even tell what the colour on the wall might have been.