The watermelons have got me wondering again. So this week it’s been watermelons, whipper snippers and wondering why all the front teeth of Chinese people are chipped?

During the week I got out on my bike and rode around some of the hundreds of apartment blocks in Longfeng. It is a fascinating ride and when I do this I am staring at things as much as the Chinese people are staring at me. During my cycle tour I must have passed 50 street vendors selling watermelons and as I rode along my mathematical mind started trying to work out just how many watermelons are farmed every season. Now we are located in the coldest part of China, not as conducive to good watermelon growing as in the rest of the country. In one of the big cities in southern China, Wuzhen I think, they have a watermelon competition to judge the best specimen and then people bid on this monstrous piece of fruit and the money goes to charity.  It’s a bit like the first cherry auction for charity that we hold in some parts of Australia and somebody with lots of money bids an outrageous amount for a kilo of cherries. Anyway, the best watermelon went for 10,600RMB, about $1700AUD. They judge on size and sweetness and there was a comment that the watermelons were not as good this year in that district due to the unseasonal rain.

Admittedly the auction is for charity but to give you an idea of the inflated price paid at that Wuzhen auction I can tell you that near the end of my ride yesterday I stopped at one of these fruit carts and bought half a watermelon weighing 6 kilos for 14RMB, that’s $2AUD! By the way, buying from roadside fruit vendors is not for the inexperienced and not something you would do if you cannot speak a word of Chinese. There’s a 200% price differential for the unwary! But my Chinese is good enough and as soon as you start a banter with the guy in Mandarin he respects that and you pay the same as the locals.....well almost.  It was a darn fine watermelon too. Also, don’t go looking for pipless watermelons. Basic fare is what you get here and really, watermelons with lots of pips are, unfortunately, due to a quirk in nature, the sweetest. The Chinese farmers don’t go in for scientific stuff like trying to make genetic changes to their watermelons but having said that I remember last year there was a real furore caused by farmers pumping forchlorfenuron into their watermelons. This chemical is a growth accelerator. Unfortunately in that area of Danyang in Jiangsu Province they had a lot of rain and that caused the melons to explode violently resulting in the watermelon farm areas being labeled as natural minefields and banning people from entering!! True story. Ever wonder how much damage an exploding watermelon can cause if it goes BOOM!! next to your leg?

I digress. So looking at the population in China….about 1.4 billion and estimating that every person would eat 2 watermelons over a 4 month availability period we are talking almost 3 billion watermelons!! This figure might be conservative as I eat about 10 watermelons during summer. My mind could not grasp such a huge number of melons and the amount of space they would take up if placed in the one spot! Then I started to think about the pips and the outer casings and then the guys who turn up to cricket matches wearing those watermelon helmets and it all got a bit much for me so I had to lie down for my afternoon siesta like the rest of China does.

As I rode past the park next to where I live I saw the workers cutting the lawns and came to the conclusion (having seen this a few times before) that there are no lawn mowers or ride-on mowers sold in China. You want to cut the grass in public parks and gardens you pick up a load of the orange brigade workers and with an accompanying truckload of whipper snippers you drop them off at the next mowdown area. Whipper Snipper sales must be astronomical because for the park there would have been 15 workers, mostly women by the way, madly whipping away at the grass. I had seen this before but at the time it never occurred to me that due to the amount of available manpower / womanpower in China that using this method was far more labour intensive than a lawn mower. There are plenty of people in China to fill vacancies too so it was no doubt the Government approved method of mowing. The noise of 15 whippersnippers was horrendous, like every bee in the world getting together to protest about plastic flowers. And if I thought that was loud the same group mowed the lawns surrounding our apartment block the next morning….at 7.30am. That sounded like the entire Daqing population of mosquitoes, about 300 trillion, was trying to break through my flywired windows!

  Another observation? While most of the orange brigade ladies were swinging their whipper snippers through the grass in the park the menfolk were sitting outside a nearby shop or restaurant playing mahjong, cards and Chinese checkers on makeshift tables while drinking beer and smoking cigarettes! Seems China got it right about the battle of sexes – haha!

And the chipped teeth? Well they all eat some sort of nut or seed here. I think they are sunflower seeds, black little buggars that I would feed to caged birds rather than eat. Their husks can be found everywhere, in elevators, lobbies, street corners, hospital rooms, toilets, wherever the people have a moment to chew and spit out comes a bag of these seeds. You eat these by placing the seed between your front teeth, breaking the outer shell then eating the inner part. Breaking the husk eventually weakens the front teeth so if you are ever in Chinese company take the time to have a look. Small fragments missing from the two front teeth, like little chips – everybody. I first noticed it some months back and it had me puzzled for ages until one of my colleagues mentioned it to me as he was eating a packet of these seeds! People with dentures cannot partake!

So many mysteries, so little time, so much fun.