I’m trying to be a good citizen or resident or businesswoman or whatever you want to call me.
I figure I use the things that tax money buys. I use the roads and the street lights at night. I use the parks and the heavily subsidized public transportation.
So I figure it's only right that I ought to pay taxes.
Since avoiding paying taxes remains significantly easier than the act of actually paying taxes, I pre…
There's always "one more thing" that wasn't mentioned the first time around.
I'm in the middle of the registration process for a client's company.
Because I know the process, and because the sole reason for hiring my personal assistant Jimmy was to have someone who stands in lines, things are going much much faster for him than when I did the registration on my own -- but things aren't exactly going smoothly.
…
Recently, a colleague at work told me this supposedly common Chinese phrase: 生活就像强奸，如果奋力反抗无济于事，那就躺下静静享受吧. Roughly translated, this phrase in English is as follows: “Life is like rape. If you are unable to resist it, then you might as well lay back and enjoy it.” While this statement is typically used to describe situations where people are playfully goaded into doing certain things (e.g. a friend “making you” go …
Philippines-based tour operator, A3 Tours & Travel, recently posted the following story on their Facebook page from a passenger on a Hong Kong flight. The tl;dr of it is that you should not naively believe your carry-on luggage is safe in the overhead bins -- the contents might not just have shifted during flight, they might have been lifted.
As many of us routinely fly, and specifically fly the flights li…
I'm sure we'll all breath a deep sigh of relief that Shanghai’s Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) is sparing no expense to improve communication with the city's public on the quality of air in China's largest city.
According to blogger Angel Hsu, the EPB has recently updated their Web site to feature a more (user) friendly interface with the addition of "AQI girl" that expresses in cartoon form what our lungs …
They roamed the streets of her hometown, knocking their sticks along to lay a path in that endless shade. What they could not see with their eyes the cards showed them by touch. Lu Jun was little when her mother made them show her her future. They rambled on for awhile, illshapen words boiling down to one sentence: she will be happy at a great school.
She never forgot this.
In primary school they took their les…
![Daniel Lau's "Wave of the Day" Barrel [photo: Jesse Warren]](http://www.lostlaowai.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SHO2012-DanielLauBarrel-200x200.jpg)
Growing up on the Great Lakes in Southern Ontario, surfing was always an abstract thing. It was something you did in video games, or watched in movies. It was exotic and a bit magical.
This past weekend the family and I had an opportunity to attend China's longest running surf competition, the 2012 Skullcandy Surfing Hainan Open. I'll admit, I had no idea what to expect, but ended up having a blast.
The eve…
I thought I had seen all the wacky Chinglish translations there were, but this one grabbed my attention. From Weibo, the picture has quite different ways of telling its domestic and foreign patrons how to use the urinal. For the English, it makes a rather crude joke about the size of one's member. For the Chinese however, we get 靠近一小步文明一大步 (Kàojìn yī xiǎo bù wénmíng yī dà bù); which roughly translates to "One sma…
Surfing Hainan Open, China's longest running surf competition, hits the shores of Hainan's picturesque Riyue Bay this November 4-5.
For the first time ever, competition organizers are expecting the lion's share of the 40 competitors to be Chinese nationals; a big milestone for the sport, which is just starting to come into its adolescence in China.
Commenting on the event, Surfing Hainan founder and event organ…
![A tour bus enveloped in flames after rear-ending a container truck on an expressway near Beijing on Oct 1, 2012. [Photo from weibo.com/lifecuc]](http://www.lostlaowai.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/german-tour-bus-fire-01-200x200.jpg)
Tragic news out of Beijing today. A bus carrying a German tour group was engulfed in flames after rear-ending a truck on a highway near Beijing. Current reports indicate that six people have died, and a further 14 are injured.
While the identities of the victims have not yet been released, five of the dead are reportedly Germans, and one Chinese.
The joint Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holiday/Golden…
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