I arrived in Beijing three weeks ago; a native Iowan of the United States far from the land-locked Midwestern state I call home. I was eager    1    (experience) all the differences life back home never gave me. Yet soon after    2    (I) arrival I noticed some similarities, although it was laughable at first to try and compare Iowa City, where I live,    3    a population of 70,000people, and Beijing, which has about 20 million people.

I soon recognized our common love for noodles. In Beijing noodles    4    (be) a part of the traditional everyday diet and an essential part of northern Chinese     5    (dish). I’m happy to report that noodles continue to be a part of my meals and are just as affordable.

Iowans know a lot about rural life as an     6    (agriculture) state and depend on it, like China, for jobs. Iowa is also known for raising quality pigs,    7    we love to eat and so do people in China. It is reported that pork makes up nearly three-fourths of the total meat     8    (consume) annually in China and Iowa is the     9    (large) pork producer in the US.

I suppose     10    a Beijinger sat down next to an Iowan on the subway, it would turn to be an interesting conversation.

2 . My husband and I just spent a week in Paris.    1    So the first thing we did was rent a fantastically expensive sixth-floor apartment the size of a cupboard. It was so tiny that we had to leave our suitcases in the hallway.

The place wasn’t entirely authentic, though. Unlike a normal Parisian apartment, the plumbing (水管) worked.     2    Our building even had a tiny lift with a female voice that said, “Ouverture des portes,” in perfect French. That is the only French phrase I mastered, and it’s a shame I don’t have much use for it.

Parisians are different from you and me. They never look lazy or untidy. As someone noted in this paper a couple of weeks ago, they eat great food and never gain weight.     3     French strawberries do not taste like cardboard. Instead, they explode in your mouth like little flavor bombs.

    4     On our first morning in Paris, I went around the corner to the food market to pick up some groceries. I bought a handful of perfectly ripe small strawberries and a little sweet melon. My husband and I agreed they were the best fruit we had ever eaten. But they cost $18!

In France, quality of life is much more important than efficiency.

You can tell this by cafés life. French cafés are always crowded.    5    When do these people work? The French take their 35-hour workweek seriously — so seriously that some labor unions recently struck a deal with a group of companies limiting the number of hours that independent contractors can be on call.