I grew up in the US, so when I’m there, I know how to tip. It’s not too hard to know how to tip in my adopted home, China, because you just don’t do it. You almost never tip in China. Easy. Thus, I was totally unprepared for Turkey on the tipping front.
Somewhere around the year 2002 I abandoned the Lonely Planet and guidebooks altogether. I figured it’s more fun to just get by on scattered intelligence gleaned from …
Shopping for stationery in Japan is an absolute pleasure. In China it’s sometimes fun as well. Looks like at least part of this latest round of designs is Korean-inspired:
UPDATE: Brendan has a good post on how English like in the top notebook above comes to be.…
This past week I started studying Spanish again after not studying or using it for over 7 years. I really didn’t know how I was going to do in my one-on-one lessons, considering my teacher would use only Spanish and I was expected to respond in Spanish. In my high school days I was reasonably fluent, but that was over 10 years ago.
It turns out that I did OK. I understood probably 95% of what my teacher said, and …
Well, YouTube is still blocked, but Stage6 isn’t. Although you can’t beat YouTube’s sheer quantity of content, Stage6 has much higher quality video (much of it looks fine at full screen!), much longer videos (hour-long documentaries no longer need to be split up into multiple videos), and a decent download speed for those of us in China–often better than YouTube’s was. You have to install a DivX plugin to watch the Stage6 movies, but the huge improvement in video quality …
I had a great “only in China” moment this morning that had me chuckling. On my commute to work something smelled fishy (quite literally) ahead of me, and as soon as I saw the scene I realized what had happened.
by Aapplemint on Flickr
Apparently a woman was carrying a basket of live crabs on the subway, and on the transfer from Line 2 to Line 1 in People’s Square Station, she dropped her cargo. The basket ripped open, and …
So you may have heard that YouTube is blocked in the PRC. Those of us who live here have come to depend on YouTube for little 2-minute clips of entertainment which keep us smiling throughout the workday. So now what do we do?
Well, I was all set to recommend Divx’s Stage6 as a substitute. It worked on Friday. I’ve been getting into it because it has such superior video quality and also hosts long videos. However, as of …
Yeah, I’ve had exactly two experiences whereby hair was removed from my head in Beijing, and both were less than satisfactory. So I feel complete confidence in making this huge generalization: no one in Beijing can cut hair.
The first time was when I was doing the tourist thing with my parents over the summer. I decided to try to get a shave from a barber shop rather than do it myself. Big mistake. I should have been clued …
Late Monday, Beijing flashed the Pasden Signal into the dark night. So now I am on my way to the capital for a quick trip.
More blogging when I get back!…
Towards the end of September, on one particularly nice Friday afternoon, I suddenly came with a fever. I went home to get some more sleep.
Photo by DooogwoooD on Flickr
My wife got home and proceeded to freak out. To the Chinese, a fever is serious, much more so than a cold. Somewhere in the Chinese psyche there’s a line about “fevers kill people” and modern medicine has yet to edit that line. My wife wanted to …
Despite all the dire warnings against it, I just upgraded to WordPress 2.3 without disabling any plugins. And it went fine! Whoo-hoo! Don’t try this at home, folks. I live on the wild side.
It didn’t work for my Chinese blog, though. I had Ultimate Tag Warrior installed, and the upgrade totally broke the blog. I had to go in through PHPmyAdmin to manually deactivate that one plugin to get the blog working again. Then after running the upgrade …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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