When it comes to being a lost laowai there are somedays where i feel like i’ve landed on Mars. However, on an equal amount of days i feel like i fit right in and this is perfect. But there’s still one thing i need help with and you are the perfect community for me to ask.
Picture this with me…
You are enjoying a quiet, peaceful morning at McDonald’s with two steaming hot pancakes and a beautiful cup of burnt coffee. You’ve got the iPod in and you’re reading a book you’ve been looking forward to for weeks. Then, out of nowhere, the guy who chose to sit three feet from you when the whole restaurant is empty decides that NOW is …
Well, that was pretty quick. Just two whole months since the worst of the melamine in Chinese brands of baby formula scandal - and tragedy - two of the companies involved in the food tainting, YiLi and MengNiu, are already starting PR drives to build up trust, and rebuild their shattered sales in the lucrative baby milk formula market.
The YiLi ‘rebuilding trust’ campaign has been the most prominent on TV in recent days - here is the video of their ad - and centers on the idea of “Rest assured in Yili” (伊利放心奶粉大行动 is the whole catchline) with various supermarket managers pledging, by touching their hearts, that they are suitably “assured” in YiLi’s products. Here’s a …
It’s not fair to make a judgement call on an isolated incident, but for past two months i have experienced the same situation time after time when dealing with taxi drivers in Beijing. The bottom line is this: I feel like they hate foreigners and don’t even want to try to deal with them.
My Chinese is not great by any stretch, but i know how to get around a city and i have a decent vocabulary. But when i get in a taxi in Beijing they look at me like i’m making up my own language. They don’t even want to try to understand. And when we do get going in the right direction it is awkwardly silent the whole …
Are you a laowai who’s left China for cozier shores, but miss the fun and frustration that Chinese Web surfing brings?
Do you spend nights longing for the roulette-like spin of trying to access Web sites in one of the world’s most censored nations?
Have you found yourself typing in nonsensical URLs in hopes of resurrecting the now elusive “page not found” error?
Tired of being able to visit sites about insidious topics like 
, 
, 
, 
and the likes?
Man, have we got the Firefox plugin for you! The China Channel Firefox Add-on instantly teleports your browser behind the Great Firewall of China and allows you to experience the Internet the way …
Banks collapsing, countries on the edge of bankruptcy, a near-return to the Great Depression. All looks somewhat surreal when viewed from the other side of the planet, does it not?
Precisely when - or how - the global crisis will impact on ordinary people in Asia is hard to estimate, but it’s likely to, in the first wave, be felt in a variety of manufacturing industries across Asia, including here in China, that rely on the U.S. and Europe for most of their exports. So, in the short term, it seems that China is heading for lay-offs and closures among small manufacturers of anything from sweaters to DVD players, as the ordinary folks of the Western world star to become more …
Rolling into Shanghai’s People’s Square last Sunday, New Zealander Rob Thomson was met with surprisingly little fanfare. No media to greet him, no friends or family to congratulate him. A lonesome end to an amazing journey.
The random Chinese man he asked to take his photo to mark the moment had no idea that Thomson has just completed a world record breaking odyssey. He had, in the course of 462 days, travelled an amazing 12,000 km solo and unassisted across Europe, North America, and China on a longboard skateboard.
Now relaxing for a few days in Shanghai before heading back to his native New Zealand, Rob was kind enough to field some questions for Lost Laowai.
***Cross-posted on PandaPassport.com. Re-posting here, in an effort to help out some fellow Laowai in China.
Yeah, you heard me. A gaelic football team in China. If you don’t know what gaelic/Irish football is, that doesn’t really matter so much. Just check it out below in the video. Long story short, there’s a team here in Dalian, China — not a likely place to find that brand of football either. The Dalian Wolfhounds, as they’re called, have quite a few Chinese starters this year, more than any other team I’m told. That’s great to see. It’s almost like the Jamaican bobsled team, in a way — only without the bobsled and stuff.
In the people of the United-States of America and the People’s Republic of China we have two examples of a citizenry brazenly immune to the betrayals visited upon them by their political leaders. After 8 years of Bush chaos, death and destruction, a Republican candidate still stands a good chance of seceding him at the helm of what has effectively become a gravity bound deathstar.
In China, the vandals made off with the body and soul of the nation during the great leap forward and the cultural revolution, only to steal history itself and throw themselves an early anniversary party on the buck of the people. Talk about gettin’ away with murder. The red flags rise taller than ever, hearts prouder than …
Because Chinese can be Lost Laowai too, can’t they?
Three men - one of whom is surnamed Liu, while the other two are surnamed Wang - purchased a glittering “treasure” for $2,000 in Kyrgyzstan. They brought it back to Xinjiang, hoping to make a fortune by selling it.
Because they knew nothing about the 274-kg stone, they sliced off a piece to bring to Beijing for expert analysis last January.
Last September, geologists at Tsinghua University concluded it was depleted uranium and called police.
Prosecutors in Aksu decided against arresting the men, because they obviously had no idea what they had purchased. The men have undergone medical examinations and appear to be in good health. China Daily via Digg.com
As the de facto editorial desk for Lost Laowai, I tend to get a lot of e-mail touting all the amazing things that “YOUR READERS WANT TO KNOW ABOUT”. I, perhaps overly liberally, trash the majority of them.
However, having just received notice that the 1st World Mind Sports Games is coming to Beijing, I figured I better post about it - these are clever folks, and there’s no telling what they’d do to me if I didn’t.
I mean, any dumbass can run a track or swim a few laps, but even in women’s beach volleyball (the epitome Olympic sport in my opinion) you don’t get to say shit like “won with …
Subscribe to our feed