October 2011
24 posts
5 tags
Oct 30th
3 notes
5 tags
Oct 30th
1 note
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Oct 30th
10 notes
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Upon being charged 39 RMB for a takeout dish that...
Me [pointing back and forth between the item on the menu I thought I'd ordered and the price they'd written down]: Why?
Takeout Lady: Bonus. We give bonus.
Me: Um, OK?
Takeout Lady: Bonus. You will like.
Me: Um, OK. Thanks.
Me [internal monologue]: I wish I knew enough Mandarin to explain to them the concept of "bonus."
Oct 30th
29 notes
3 tags
So China has figured out the loophole that is...
lotusmikatravels: I can still view my dashboard, receive/answer asks, and posts things; but I can’t access anyone’s actual blog page (not even my own) I am. quite distressed. :( Curse you Great Firewall of China >< Ditto. But they can — and soon will — suck on my giant VPN.
Oct 29th
10 notes
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'Black-Market Babies: Broken Families in China,... →
Yet another reason to despise the Chinese government. Keep up the good work, fellas.
Oct 29th
4 notes
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Oct 29th
3 notes
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'China Reins In Entertainment and Blogging' →
The two biggies, Blogspot and Wordpress, have apparently been blocked here for a while. Oddly, though, the Keepers of the Great Firewall didn’t catch on to Tumblr. Then, about an hour after reading this story, I found I could no longer access other Tumblr feeds either. (For some reason, though, I could — and still can, obviously — log into my own account. Strange.) Of course, the...
Oct 28th
2 notes
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Oct 28th
8 notes
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Watermelons have been bursting by the score in... →
Talk about juicing…
Oct 27th
9 notes
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Oct 26th
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“It is not easy to take the job as a flight attendant on the business airplane....”
– From a story in Hainan Air’s (mainland China’s only airline ever to receive 5 stars from Skytrax, incidentally) in-flight magazine about the life of flight attendants for business-class passengers. As far as I could tell, anyway. Google Translate should be fired.
Oct 25th
4 tags
“Nguyen Thi Phuong from Vietnam is only 26, but you would be forgiven for...”
– Lede from “Young woman ages years overnight,” in today’s Global Times (“DISCOVER CHINA, DISCOVER THE WORLD”)
Oct 25th
17 notes
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Oct 23rd
7 notes
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Oct 23rd
10 notes
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Oct 23rd
16 notes
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Oct 23rd
27 notes
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Oct 22nd
21 notes
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Oct 22nd
15 notes
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“China has taken the gamble of seeking to make people rich before it has made...”
– The conclusion to Part 2 of the annoyingly brilliant Anthony Lane’s annoyingly brilliant two-part report of the Beijing Olympics in The New Yorker
Oct 21st
15 notes
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Oct 21st
14 notes
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Oct 21st
8 notes
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Oct 21st
15 notes
2 tags
Hi from Shanghai!
I live in China now. That’s fuckin’ nuts.
Oct 18th