The Chinese concept of time is often very different from the 'Western' one...

(A mental sidestep: I find myself often using the word 'Western' now to cover everything European/American/Australian...whatnot. Even sometimes just about everything non-Chinese. Sometimes people get really confused when I answer their question of Western food or Western music with an attempt to explain that actually there are no such things at all, and that there are actually a lot of different cultures and tradition within the all-encompassin 'West'.)

...Whereas us northern Europeans (and many of those other 'westerners') plan the use of our time and our daily and weekly schedules well ahead, the Chinese hardly ever do. Back in Europe, I used to have a daily planner where I would write down my appointments, lunches with friends, and so on. And before the week even begins, you'd have two pages full of things to do. In China, nobody has a planner or a calendar. I asked my students in class and absolutely nobody had one. And why? Because there is no use for such a thing, as everything is usually decided last minute. As those Intercultural Communication people would say, the Chinese seem to tolerate uncertainty extremely well, while at the same time the laowais coming here feel often like banging their head on the wall and screaming out Chinese insults, as once again everything has changed last minute. So no use of planning on doing this or that English event next week at a certain time, someone will probably call you 5 minutes before to let you know that the plans have changed, no explanations needed.

In a way, I'm getting used to this now, but I have to admit that I still have a calendar at home where I mark my appointments, and I usually set them up with people a few days in advance... it's usually ok, as I'm a fussy laowai with a bizarre concept of time :) Three weeks ago we got a visiting professor from Switzerland who will stay here for 6 weeks, and as I was talking to him the other day he was telling me how hard he sometimes finds it that it's just plain impossible to plan things in advance. Oohh how well I understand him, but the best strategy is to just go with the flow and see what happens. At the same time, it gives us the possibility to change plans last minute, too, by just giving someone a call, which can sometimes be very useful...