This year I attended the 8pm Christmas Eve mass at the St. Ignatius cathedral in Xujiahui, Shanghai. It reminded me why I normally don’t go to Christmas Eve masses in China. In short, it’s a zoo.
The reason is that Christmas Eve has become a popular holiday in Shanghai, although it’s mainly a date holiday. Traffic was horrible that evening, as couples all went out in search of a romantic winter evening. Many of them went to churches out …
A quick search on Sina’s Weibo today revealed that Santa Claus (圣诞老人) uses the service, and his identity has even been verified (that’s what the “V” stands for: 新浪认证, or “Sina Verified”).
But actually, a little bit more reading reveals that the account is used for Christmas promotions by Sina itself:
新浪微博圣诞节活动
That account is actually a year old, though. There’s another one for 2011, based in Guangzhou rather than Beijing (??).
Hmmm, does this qualify …
Recently a Chinese friend got me into Xiami. In case you’ve never heard of it, TechRice describes it like this:
Xiami is perhaps the closest China has to a Last.fm, though in Last.fm users have to pay monthly subscriptions to listen to songs and Xiami is still completely free up until the point of download.
So think “social music site,” with both free and paid offerings.
I was interested to see how the site offers its iPhone app …
And by “awesome,” I mean flashy (or sparky?), fluid, and fun! Check out this video:
More info on the Skritter iOS page. This is definitely an app I’ll be getting as soon as it comes out, and I’ll be reviewing it in the future.…
For the longest time, I wondered why 恒鑫茶饮 used the English name “yex.” Here’s the logo:
Doesn’t it seem like “Heng Xin” or something related would make more sense for a company called 恒鑫茶饮? Eventually it dawned on me that “yex” is actually “HX” in “fancy lettering.”
Which one do you see?…
Sinosplice’s Christmas Songs in Chinese have been popular every year around this time for a while now, and one of the most common comments let has been, “can you provide the lyrics in pinyin?” Well, it’s actually quite a lot of work to assemble all the (correct) lyrics, which is why I hadn’t done it before. This year, however, I decided to leverage some of AllSet Learning‘s resources and finally make it happen. (They may not be perfect though, …
Nicki Minaj has one of the more interesting Chinese tattoos out there. It’s not particularly pretty (it was clearly not the ink work of a Chinese calligrapher!), but the traditional characters are correct mostly correct and legible. The tattoo:
It means “God is with you.”
The tattoo uses traditional Chinese characters:
上帝與你常在
Here’s the simplified character version (it only differs by one character):
上帝与你常在
And pinyin:
Shàngdì yǔ nǐ cháng zài
The …
John has lived in China for
11.8
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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