I’m now home briefly before heading off to Yinchuan (Òø´¨). Somehow I doubt Yinchuan will have very good internet access. I’ll be gone for about 5 days.
In the meantime I’ll share a really cool blog. Micah is a China blogger who’s been around pretty much as long as any China blogger I know of, and I keep finding more and more stuff of his online. Micah is currently in China, and prolific as…
I’m still in Qingdao, getting in one last internet session before returning to my crippled Shanghai connection. I’m on an ADSL connection, and I haven’t accessed my webmail and website at this speed in quite a while.
The other night I went online via a friend’s laptop. He had a mobile phone card. The connection was slow, but it was completely wireless and independent of wi-fi “hot spots” (which is good, because there wouldn’t have been any where we…
Friday morning I’ll be on a plane to Qingdao (青岛). I’ll have just missed the beer festival, but that doesn’t matter. I’m sure Qingdao is not out of beer, and the city’s still there to be seen. I’ll take Monday to do just that.
Tuesday I’ll fly out to Yinchuan (银川), capital of Ningxia (宁夏) Province. I’m told the agent is going to take us sightseeing there. Yinchuan is next to the Gobi Desert…
I could swear this website is being dogged by a curse. I change hosts, but it finds me again. This is the third time.
Some time during the week I was in Hubei it began. At the time I thought it was just a Hubei thing, but I was wrong. Within China, it is now very dificult to access Sinosplice. The blog will usually load, but very slowly and sometimes incompletely. Getting into my webmail is difficult. If I can…
I’m still in Hubei on business. I’ve been here for almost a week. Despite all the warnings I got that Hubei (and especially Wuhan, which I haven’t been to yet) is like an oven, it’s been refreshingly cool the whole time I’ve been here. It’s because of the rain (typhoon?), I guess. It’s been a great break from Shanghai’s muggy heat.
I am still looking for a teacher trainer, but I’m having a lot of trouble accessing my e-mail…
The day I took the photos for my Solar Visor entry I also took some other pictures. I’ll share a few of them here.
Siesta
It’s a popular custom in China for people to take a nap after lunch. I really don’t understand how the laborers can sleep in such searing heat, but they do it all the time. (Although not always so cuddly-like.)
You know that dinner you had last night…?
What, did you think everything…
Yesterday I went to a kindergarten to teach a few classes with a co-worker. The kindergarten is inside a walled community. Not the kind of rich walled community you may be thinking of, but rather a big collection of fairly run-down Chinese apartment buildings which happen to be surrounded by a wall.
On the way out, we passed two men burning stuff near the garbage. My first thought was, “Just great. As if the pollution wasn’t bad enough, people also…
Recently I had a chance to tour three of Shanghai’s main universities as part of a last-ditch effort to find someone for my company ASAP. The idea was to visit schools with Chinese study programs, find the foreigners, and possibly recruit a qualified one. I chose a really hot day to do it. In one day I covered Shanghai Jiao Tong University (上海交通大学), then East China Normal University (华东师范大学), and finally Shanghai International Studies University (上海外国语大学).…
Without a doubt, food is one of the major perks of living in China. Not only do we get the most authentic Chinese flavors here, but we frequently get them cheap. In addition, a Westerner living in China will inevitably be exposed to all kinds of new and exotic foodstuffs completely unavailable back home. What the Westerner doesn’t expect is to discover those exotic foods produced by familiar American multinational corporations and displayed in Chinese convenience stores.
One such example…
In order to become really fluent in a foreign language, it’s more than just a matter of learning vocabulary and grammar and stringing them together flawlessly. Some of the hardest aspects to master in order to sound truly native-like are intonation and accent. Usually there comes a point when, either through lack of effort or through linguistic inability, non-native speakers stop improving (look at Arnold Schwarzenegger). Linguists call this phenomenon fossilization. (The term…
John has lived in China for
10
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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