I love tennis: watching and playing. What with queueing with the common people overnight twice to get my tickets, fond, overpriced strawberry & cream memories of posh debenture holders drinking champagne and dozing in their seats, oh, and the tennis, Wimbledon necessarily remains my most eagerly anticipated annual sporting event. Forget football, it’s those long [...]
Archive for June, 2008
Book Review: A Stress Reliever and History Lesson in One
For the last month or so I’ve been really stressed out at work. When I get into a state like that I tend to look for books that help giving me a new perspective on the situation. That’s how I found Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, the story of Ximen Nao, [...]
Lost Laowai Celebrates 2nd Birthday
I’m a bit crap at remembering birthdays, and so this is a bit late – but Lost Laowai officially turned 2 years old a week or so ago. It’s a bit hard to believe that it was that long ago I started clacking away on my keyboard attempting to put together some sort of site [...]
British Embassy in China Eager To Locate You
I’ve just received the following press release release from the British Embassy in Beijing. It appears to me that the office has taken some heat from home about tracking down their nationals in natural disasters, and is now very concerned you may get crushed in a shoddily-built school or swept away in a flood – [...]
Hong Laowai has some serious Commie Stones
This guy has guts. And I like him for a bunch of reasons.
For those who don’t know, Hong Laowai (means “Red Foreigner”) has been a bit of an internet celeb over the past year. He stands in front of a webcam, and belts out the most ridiculous old communist propaganda tunes. But you can see he’s having a good time with it, and a lot of it is tongue-in-cheek.
Unlike Dashan, I like Hong Laowai because he knows he’s being ridiculous.
A Modest Proposal
I first became aware of the enormous language gap in China three weeks into my first year, when I taught English at a public high school in northern Jiangsu. One afternoon, feeling slightly homesick, I hopped into a taxi with a simple mission: to go to McDonalds. Being completely unable to speak Chinese at that [...]
Bikini-clad Chinese girls show off their … Olympic spirit
Finally some Chinese Olympic fever I can appreciate: h/t to Jenny Zhu – and you thought she just did ChinesePod – that’s just her part-time gig. Her real career centres around hunting down videos of hot Chinese girls in swimsuits. It’s a tough job, but someone needs to do it. Really.
Looking for good independent Chinese music? Neocha delivers
I love music. Don’t well all? Music is awesome. But I hate pre-fab pop. Don’t we all? Pre-fab pop is crap. That China’s mainstream music scene is near completely made up of boy bands and girl groups is a sad fact. But mainstream music scenes usually are (sad facts). So, when after digging around a [...]
Photo of the Week: A Beautiful Landscape
This great photo by photographer Jaune d’eau is the perfect visual pairing for the news this week that China has overtaken the US as the world’s leading producer of climate-warming gasses. Submit Your Photos Every week(ish) we’ll feature an interesting, funny, beautiful or otherwise noteworthy photo here. If you have a photo you think might [...]
My Brush with China Daily Hong Kong
Recently a friend forwarded my name to a freelance reporter for the China Daily Hong Kong edition. Yes, like many of you, I didn’t know China Daily had a Hong Kong edition …more on that later. The Canadian born Chinese China Daily reporter emailed me a list of questions regarding English teaching and English use [...]
