走马看花 (zou3 ma3 kan4 hua1) was the first chengyu I ever learned. It was Chinese New Year 2012 and my boss took me to his hometown and we traveled around the province going sightseeing and drinking bai jiu. Of course, we did A LOT of sightseeing (and drank A LOT of bai jiu). In China, part of the prevailing tourism ethos is to try and see as much as you can in as little time as possible. It's also to drink as much bai jiu as you can in as little time as possible. However, when it comes to bai jiu, that's also just ingrained in the ethos of the broad institution of Chinese culture itself. But I digress...

In one of our briefer stints in an ancient town that looks like every single other ancient town in China, my boss turned to me and said 我们走马看花。It took a minute for him to gesticulate the meaning of each character because his English was only marginally better than my Chinese at the time, but once I got the meaning of all of the characters it clicked immediately. 走马看花 literally means galloping on a horse looking at flowers, or, gain a shallow understanding from a fleeting glance.



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