Random Sunday Musings…

Random thoughts after three weeks on the road…

Back in Beijing and it’s now fall.  Fall is easily the loveliest time of the year here in the city of imperial dust.  Unfortunately, it’s also the shortest season.  How short? Last year I missed it because I had a meeting that afternoon.

Taking advantage of the weather and the holiday, YJ and I trekked over to Haidian Park for the first day of the Modern Sky Festival.  Coolest moment: braving a short cloudburst with 500 or so Chinese hippies as the band Sound Fragment (声音碎片) played onstage and took us through the rain and out the other side into a (rare) gorgeous sunset behind the Western Hills.

Least cool moment: As much as I (and others) like to complain about Chinese crowd behavior on the subway, in the mall, etc. One place where it kind of works is at an outdoor concert with festival seating.  In fact, the real douchebags pushing and shoving their way drunkenly through the crowd are usually the Lao Wai.

(Yeah, I’m looking at you drunk China newbie with the Jägermeister thundersticks shoving your way to the front midway through Second Hand Rose’s set.)

Funniest moment: Douchebag’s

October 3rd, 2010

The falling face of "Made in China"

I understand the concerns of food safety, poisoned baby formula, unsafe tires, lead in the toys and whatnot, BUT…it’s the little things about shoddy Chinese merchandise that get me most. By way of example: YJ and I recently purchased a few paintings–not an original Picasso to be sure, but not the sort of stuff you pick up at the Silk Market. The problem is hanging them. Our walls are made of a strange material that is too hard for hammers and yet crumbles mysteriously when you try to drill/screw anything into the surface.

So we went to the local market to look for those ubiquitous little “sticky hooks”, finally finding some plain white ones. (Meaning: without flowers, bugs, butterflies, bunnies, or cutesy ungrammatical English.) We took them home, followed the little instructions: 1) place on wall 2) wait 24 hours 3) hang pictures. The pictures were not heavy and we used two or three for anything that weighed more than say, our hamster.

Sure enough in the 12 hours since, our walls have been raining paintings. I mean it’s a downpour.

I mentioned this to the shopkeeper who sold the hooks–Yes I know, but I like truly futile quests with

October 8th, 2007

This is getting ridiculous…50% of water coolers in Beijing have fake water

As the dog days of summer descend on Beijing…word from The China Daily that 50% of the water used in water coolers across the city of Beijing is probably fake or substandard: either straight tap water or water from smaller brands with lower quality standards repackaged with ‘seals of quality’ for sale to Beijing homes and businesses.

This one hits close to home. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a large mammal from a cold climate forced to live in the sauna/industrial coal elevator that is Beijing in July. I drink A LOT of water. Now you can’t even trust that.

So when I read this article, I went into full Pacino mode (think GF2 when Michael surprises Frankie Pants at the old Corleone home in New York):

“The water…IN MY HOME! IN MY BEDROOM! What my wife uses to make zhou… and what my hamster drinks, when he’s done…playing…on his wheel!”

Okay, so the line works better if you’re a Mafia don with children, but you get my point.

From the CD:

Up to half of the water used in water coolers across China’s capital could be “fake,” or not as pure as its manufacturers claim, state media said

July 10th, 2007

Why bother?

“An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will” – Thomas Jefferson————————Blogspot is down. Blogsome is down. Type pad. Word press.

People are pissed.

Two things come to mind:

1) This is going to get worse before it gets better. The CCP has shown no particular evidence that such niceties as “access to information” and “a more open media for 2008″ are going to have any effect on their haphazard and arbitrary blocking of internet sites here in the Olympic city.

2) Why bother?

Seriously. Why bother blocking foreign bloggers or foreign media sites? Do the Chinese people really sit in front of their screens hitting refresh, refresh, refresh to check out what some laowai thought of last night’s gongbao jiding? Is the CCP so weak–in such imminent danger of losing its legitimacy–that it can be brought down by the strangled tones of the BBC World Service?

Apparently the website Flickr is blocked now, too. Well, that’s a relief because I’m sure Hu Jintao sweated through his jammies at night worrying that photographic evidence of “Bobby Sue’s Sweet Sixteen at the Marietta, GA Holiday Inn and Conference Center” was going to unleash a second Cultural Revolution.

If

June 27th, 2007

A Noah’s Ark of Death found off of the Chinese Coast

I’m pissed.

From today’s Guardian: Endangered, hunted, smuggled and now abandoned, 5,000 of the world’s rarest animals have been found drifting in a deserted boat near the coast of China.

The pangolins, Asian giant turtles and lizards were crushed inside crates on a rickety wooden vessel that had lost engine power off Qingzhou island in the southern province of Guangdong. Most were alive, though the cargo also contained 21 bear paws wrapped in newspaper.

According to conservation groups, the haul was discovered on one of the world’s most lucrative and destructive smuggling routes: from the threatened jungles of south-east Asia to the restaurant tables of southern China.

The animals were found when local fishermen noticed a strange smell emanating from the vessel, which did not have any registration plates, on Tuesday, the Guangzhou Daily reported.

When coastguard officials boarded the 25-metre craft, it was reportedly deserted and stripped of identification papers. They found more than 200 crates full of animals, many so dehydrated in the tropical sun that they were close to death.

This isn’t about some farmers in China being “too poor” to worry about conservation. This isn’t about the need for economic development in struggling areas even

May 26th, 2007
 
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