When I first moved to the States I was puzzled by the way their maps of the world looked like. The American continent was in the middle with Europe/Africa on the right hand side (to the east) and Asia on the left hand side of the map (to the west) which was not the way a map of the world looked like to me. In general, America is situated to the left and Asia to the right. Isn’t Japan called the rising sun nation? And what about the Far East, they have the Middle East but the Far East is on the west side of their map!
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Anyway I was telling our driver Mr Wang that my sister was coming to visit and I joked that he had to learn French since she and her family don’t speak English. He asked me if the letters were the same than English which kind of confused me!! Then I realized that from a Chinese point of view, the world’s languages are not necessarily written in roman letters.
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And for your personal knowledge (I need to keep giving you those little trivial pursuit answers!) : China (& Russia) each share a common border with the most countries (14 for each country). China shares a border with Afghanistan; Bhutan; India; Kazakhstan; North Korea; Kyrgyzstan; Laos; Mongolia; Myanmar (Burma); Nepal; Pakistan; Russia; Tajikistan; and Vietnam.
