Dear American Consulate in Shanghai:
This Thursday a Chinese girl will have an interview for a visa to visit the United States. She will explain to you that she’s my girlfriend, and she would just like to visit my family with me in Florida this summer. It’s the truth. She’ll have a mountain of evidence as to why both she and I plan to stay in Shanghai. It’s all legit. My entrance exam for grad school at East China Normal …
拉面 is a kind of Chinese noodle. (Its cousin better known in the West is the Japanese adaptation, ramen.) It’s fun watching 拉面 being made. The process (via About.com):
To make the noodles, roll the dough into a long cylinder. Rub sesame oil over. Grab both ends of the dough. Twist the dough, and then pull it out, stretching your arms apart. Fold the dough in half. Continue stretching and folding the dough until it forms fine noodles.
…
The full two-trilogy Star Wars DVD set is already available for purchase in Shanghai in two attractive versions: the simple 6-disc set (60rmb) and the deluxe 10-disc set featuring the “making of” segments (200rmb). Both look extremely professional and come in a special case, shrink-wrapped and all.
Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is actually a very clear copy, but it has unattractive “burned in time code across the top” for the entire movie. The other five movies …
Did you ever have to diagram in gradeschool? Remember how that worked? Here’s an example:
They mixed the dough quickly, put it into the oven, and waited.
It’s intended to help the mind better grasp parts of speech and how they relate to each other in a sentence. I don’t think it really helps much, though. It seems more like demented grammarians forcing their “fun” on innocent children.
Here’s a quote from Gertrude Stein: “I really do not know …
I bought this book a while back solely because of its title: 老外也会喜欢你 (“Foreigners Will Like You Too”). The author was a twenty-something Chinese woman and, judging from the book’s cover (oops), the intended audience was Chinese women. It seemed likely that the laowai referred to in the title were male ones. Like me. This was going to be entertaining, I thought.
I was very wrong. Every time I tried to read the book, it failed completely to hold …
Star Wars: Episode III
Last night I went to see Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (AKA 星球大战前转3) with some friends. We went to the 9:40pm showing at Hongqiao Century Universal Theatre (虹桥世纪电影城) and paid 60rmb (about US$7.50) per ticket.
For the day after the much-anticipated movie just opened and a Saturday night, the turnout wasn’t spectacular. The theater was only about half full. There were a handful of foreigners in attendance.
I have …
A while back I met with a professor of East China Normal University to discuss my upcoming entrance exams for grad school (exams: modern Chinese, composition). He told me the exam would be administered at the end of May or beginning of June.
Well, the end of May is quickly approaching. He left me his phone number to contact him if I had any questions, so I’ve given him quite a few calls lately, but there’s never any answer. The …
I am just starting to get into Flickr. I’m a little slow to jump on that bandwagon, yes, I know. I’ve discovered that I’m too lazy to bother designing photo albums anymore, and somehow even something like Gallery doesn’t seem that appealing. I’m still exploring Flickr, but I may end up using it in the feature.
Right now, though, you can enjoy a great set of Beijing photos by Frank Yu. I’m not sure how to articulate the …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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2005
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I have removed the comment function from this blog. Hopefully it will only be temporary. The reason is comment spam.
Although I actually see very little comment spam thanks to MT Blacklist, my comment script still gets hit hard by the spammers, who are then denied by MT Blacklist. Unfortunately, all those hits to the comment script put quite a strain on the server. That’s why my host disabled my comment script several times in the past.
A few …