I recently stumbled across this Flickr group called Chinese Restaurant Worldwide Documentation Project. It has this intriguing description:
Chinese Restaurants – Worldwide, except China and Taiwan. Here you’ll find the culture ‘clash’ and culture ‘mash’ with all the societies they have adapted to.
Below are a few examples of photos from the group pool, taken at locations all over the world.
Genoa, Italy:
Santa Cruz, Bolivia:
Brooklyn, New York, USA:
Antwerp,…
I was delighted to discover churros in Beijing, and with ice cream! (Sure, why not?) But the second English name threw me for a loop: “Kyrgyzstan Things Fruit.”
I don’t know why “churros” wasn’t enough, but apparently this is another casualty of horrible character-by-character machine translation. So we have a case of:
Foreign word → Chinese transliteration → horrible machine translation to English
churros → 吉事果 → “Kyrgyzstan Things Fruit”
Why go all the…
Images brought to you by Marco of ItalianPod fame (and also the artistic eye behind ChinesePod’s recent videos).
I’m a Firefox user, and one of the greatest things about it is its extensibility. PicLens, a full-screen 3D image viewer that works especially well with Flickr, has got to be one of the best extensions I have ever seen (even if it is almost too iPhone). I never blogged about a Firefox addon before because there wasn’t really a reason to. Now I never want to go back to boring HTML views on Flickr.
You have to…
Check out this picture:
These were the thoughts running through my head leading up to the shot:
Wow, look at the size of that load. I should take a picture. Hey, this is totally one of the most cliché China photos ever: the “big load on a tricycle” photo. And this load isn’t even that big. In all my time in China, I’ve never taken that picture, though. I’m gonna take it.
So the above is…
Now that I’m a “Shanghai snob,” I had to laugh at Hangzhou’s East Train Station waiting room VIP seating:
Wandering around Shanghai the other day, I stumbled upon this street food:
Yes, those are raw oysters. I’m hoping the thing behind them is for cooking them, but I didn’t find out exactly how they were supposed to be eaten.
Here they are being prepared:
I think it’s safe to say that my personal quest for “surest way to get food poisoning ever” has finally come to an end.
I had off for the May holiday today, so I got to sleep in. After lunch I went for a stroll in Zhongshan Park.
Outside the park there were vendors selling pets. The main ones were rabbits, dwarf hamsters, chicks, and ducklings.
The park was crowded, but the weather was great. Some people (like me) were there just to walk around.
Others were boating.
Some were flying kites.…
This is a blind musician playing outside of Nanjing Road West (南京西路) Station in Shanghai. Two questions:
Is it OK to photograph a blind person without their knowing it? (I photographed this guy without asking, and then gave him 5 RMB.) The ethics of photography has always been an interesting subject to me, and it’s one I’ve actually really quite struggled with over the years, especially in the northern mountains of Thailand and in China’s Yunnan.
What
…
My wife and I had a nice time in Chongqing, even though we saw only a sliver of what the city had to offer. We took Matt Scranton’s excellent advice and checked out 瓷器口. There were so many cool snacks to try that we couldn’t even eat lunch, and a little later we wound up lost in a maze of twisting old alleyways up on the mountain. We also went to 洪崖洞, which was…
John has lived in China for
9.9
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
All Posts