I got hit by a car yesterday. Before you panic, I am OK! I am OK because, while the car drove into me, it was going, like, 5 miles an hour? It kind of hit my purse first, which I was holding down by my side, and then all of a sudden I felt this […]
Or so this article claims, rather dramatically. But I am here to refute that claim. Because I am not leaving. Oh, no, I am staying put. I’m so staying put that I just signed a lease for two more years. #notalleveryone In all seriousness, though, the author does have a point. The recent crackdowns on […]
It was time to get a new visa, so back to the States I went. The visa run, a time-honored tradition for expats living in China, may seem quite inconvenient, but I love the opportunity to travel on the company’s dime. A free trip home? Why not! This time, the timing was especially convenient because […]
It’s the middle of peach season, and China has some of the juiciest and sweetest peaches in the world. Here, they are called 水蜜桃 (shui mi tao), or “water honey peaches.” As a peach lover, I find them to be irresistible, but a traumatic experience a couple of years ago has deterred me from messing […]
With a new week comes a new ban: Four American TV shows are the first to be removed from Chinese video sites in the Communist Party’s latest effort to rein in online speech. While films and televisions have always been tightly controlled, the Internet was almost untouchable, and video sites such as Sohu and iQiyi […]
The WSJ’s China Real Time blog has a fun article on Chinese words in the English lexicon (there are few compared to other languages, such as French, Italian and Yiddish), based on a Xinhua report about Chinese buzzwords that have made it onto the great linguistic archive … Urban Dictionary. Seriously, the Chinese state media […]
Every laowai in China makes a few mistakes here that he will regret forever. I’m not talking about major things like not learning enough Chinese or not immersing oneself in the culture enough — just daily decisions we wish we hadn’t gotten ourselves into. Mine is when I signed up to join a SPA. And […]
Every so often, a new music video for Beijing — from Shin’s One Night in Beijing, to the 2008 Olympics anthem Beijing Welcomes You, to last year’s Beijing State of Mind — crops up to showcase the culture and various lifestyles in our fair city. This latest one, by Stephy Chung, is by far my […]
Now that it’s a new year, we can look back on the old year! The main question is, of course, how many blue sky days did we have? According to statistics for the year released by the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, which ranks each day from 1 to 6 (highest level of pollution), 176 days […]
It’s been a busy month, guys, from planning a visa run and planning a trip home to planning what to wear to Boyfriend’s first fight and planning Thanksgiving dinner. Now that all of that is over with, I can tell you what happened! For my next visa run, I’m going to Singapore! I found a […]