WBSD – Holidays & Celebrations Welcome to World Blog Surf Day! Today we are blogging about our favorite new holidays and celebrations. One of the things I find interesting about Chinese celebrations, particularly weddings, is the use of noise. Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom! Wedding cannons on display – Photo by Simon Lim I am no longer [...]
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Now that I’ve been positively identified as a female China blogger, I thought I should post something über-feminine and I think shopping qualifies, right? My shopping tale begins last November. I had been invited to attend a wedding in Vienna, Austria and as any woman would, I immediately began to panic over my lack of [...]
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Gadling reports that a new mall in Nanjing, China is opening full of “copycat” Western brand stores, such as Bucksstar coffee, OMC McDnoald’s and Pizza Huh. Hilarious! Yes, there are lot of copycats, fake brands and knock-offs in China. I see them just about everyday, everywhere. I wouldn’t even know how to purchase a real [...]
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Whew, I just experienced the scariest 20 minutes of my life. The electricity in our entire apartment complex just went out. It’s -12 outside right now. That’s 10 F. That’s seriously cold. As I lit every candle in our apartment, all 4 of them including my new Christmas tree candle, which I was thinking was [...]
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or Winter Solstice! Evidently, today we are supposed to eat some sort of dumpling. In Southern China they eat a small ball made from glutinous rice and in the North they eat dumplings made from wheat. I love dumplings, but I don’t feel like eating them tonight. Instead I will have stir fried rice with [...]
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Rant Warning! I forgot to mention the appalling things I observed while in downtown Linyi last night. I don’t like to harp on the hygiene issue in China but I find it all so abhorrent that I am going to call them out on every indecent thing I see. It’s just not right. Case point [...]
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The PRC isn’t exactly what it used to be, or what it promised to be. The Olympics are right around the corner, and so are paramilitary police, increased scrutiny and an overall sense that things have definitely gotten weird. I’m back in Linyi (more to come on that) and the Olympic spirit/nationalist fervor is as [...]
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Okay, so this is really gross, but I’ve been trying to think of ways that the US surprises me, or how it is dramatically different from China, and I have to admit that ever since I got here, I’ve kind of been freaked out about what to do with the toilet paper… See, in China, [...]
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I’ve been busy! You know, doing stuff like: Watching TV – Actually, more like feeling overwhelmed by the 400+ channels everyone gets these days, still, there’s nothing much on any of them. Visiting grocery stores – I’ve been doing this much like normal people visit museums. Whole Foods market is beautiful! HEB (Texas grocery store) [...]
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Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, is right around the corner. How do I know this? Because everyday brings an increasing number of fireworks. With all the booms, rockets and noise, I feel like I might be in Baghdad. All the neighborhood shops have put out boxes of baijiu (Chinese white rice liquor), oranges, red [...]
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I'm an American expat living on the fringe of Chinese society. Thanks to a lifetime spent moving around, I often feel like an outsider. This blog explores life in Beijing, China, the occasional aviation topic, expat issues, random travel experiences and interesting things I see, read and hear. If you want to know more about my latest hobby, visit Sewing on the Fringe, where I blog about learning to sew in Beijing. And for daily documentation of Beijing's ever changing air quality, visit My Beijing Window. And, yes, I do wear my santa hat year-round. ;)
