It’s not fair to make a judgement call on an isolated incident, but for past two months i have experienced the same situation time after time when dealing with taxi drivers in Beijing. Â The bottom line is this: I feel like they hate foreigners and don’t even want to try to deal with them. My …Read More
© Rickenbacker I was standing on the street corner the other day waiting for a taxi beside a middle-aged foreigner doing the same. This isn’t uncommon, I live in a rather laowai-saturated area of Suzhou. The corner also works as an impromptu parking spot for people looking to dash over to the bakery, or pick …Read More
The other day I was listening in on a class of Chinese students who were taking an evening course in my native language, Swedish. Their task for the day was to change nouns written in singular form to plural, (that is: “cat†to “catsâ€). This can be complicated enough in English: How do you now …Read More
Ever since seeing Beijing’s punk poster-boys Reflector at Xining’s Material Life Music Bar, I’ve been thinking an awful lot about tattoos. This Material Life Music Bar was full of inked Chinese and foreigners; it was the highest volume of tattoos I’d seen in a while and the inspiration for the following rant. There are two …Read More
I was watching this video (see below) of some dude reading a Chinese passage. I don’t know about you, but when I hear Chinese spoken in this way it gives me that nails-on-a-chalkboard feeling. Sorry no, it gives me that I-want-to-kick-you-in-the-nads feeling.Read More
Are you a laowai who’s left China for cozier shores, but miss the fun and frustration that Chinese Web surfing brings? Do you spend nights longing for the roulette-like spin of trying to access Web sites in one of the world’s most censored nations? Have you found yourself typing in nonsensical URLs in hopes of …Read More
Neocha, China’s premier online creative community, has just released the third album on its Netlabel: Tomorrow’s Afternoon Tea / 明天的下åˆèŒ¶. You may remember a post a while back where we interviewed Neocho CEO Sean Leow, and talked about their awesome NEXT player, which streams indie Chinese music for free. The new album contains 10 tracks …Read More
Recently a friend of mine from Australia recently confided that while he likes learning Chinese, he still fails to see the utility of characters. “I still don’t see why they just don’t use pinyin,” he said with a shrug. I began to explain why characters are, in fact, useful, beginning with the sheer number of …Read More
The ebb and flow of Chinese Nationalistic fervor mixed with undying “historic” hatred of the Japanese should really replace ping pong as China’s national sport. Japanese & Chinese Students Fight In Shanghai: A group of drunk Japanese foreign students making noise get into a fight with Chinese students at a university in Shanghai. Two Chinese …Read More
found on: 51jms.com. In my four years in China I’ve yet to see a legitimate version of any software here. Generally when purchasing apps and games in the Middle Kingdom you have two choices – pirated software that looks pirated, and pirated software that looks real. Like pretty much every other media, most notably DVDs, …Read More
The comments on this photo’s flickr page say it all – “classic China”. As the warm weather is quickly becoming a memory, I wanted to slip this image, by Elephant on a Bicycle, in here before we bundle up and don our long undies for winter.Read More
Banks collapsing, countries on the edge of bankruptcy, a near-return to the Great Depression. All looks somewhat surreal when viewed from the other side of the planet, does it not? Precisely when – or how – the global crisis will impact on ordinary people in Asia is hard to estimate, but it’s likely to, in …Read More
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