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 sweeping camera shots of the fluffy grey-cloud covered, green-treed environs of London’s SW19 that brings a rose-tinted mistiness to my eye every time.
At long last China may be joining me. Zheng Jie’s calm despatching of recent French Open champion and world number 1 Ana Ivanovic last night, in the third round …
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, a landlord from Shandong province who is executed by the Communists on New Year’s
Day 1950 and spends the next 50 years being reincarnated as a series of different animals as he attempts to redeem himself and make his way back …
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 that could deliver information and opinions about China that didn’t have any particular “agenda” (hence the whole “no-nonsense” China guide/expat community slogan).
The site still has a lot I would like to improve and build upon, but by and by I’m quite happy with the way it has evolved - in …
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 - and that just does not happen to Brits. It’s just not… proper.
Neither is the cost of an airlift out of a danger zone.
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.
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 point, I was fairly confident that the word “McDonalds” would be international enough for my driver to understand.
Alas, when I said the magic word, he gave me a blank stare and shook his head. I then proceeded to draw the golden arches on a piece of paper, hoping my driver would at least recognize an international symbol. No luck. We drove around in circles for …
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.
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 bit I couldn’t find even the remotest signs of an independent music scene to offset the crud cracking out of cheap shop-front speakers, I was crushed.
That was three years ago. Despite being a musician (of sorts) and having worked as a music journalist (of sorts) before coming to China - I shelved my musical appetite and accepted that when it came to …
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Every week(ish) we’ll feature an interesting, funny, beautiful or otherwise noteworthy photo here. If you have a photo you think might make a good Photo of the Week, throw it in the pool at the Lost Laowai flickr Group and if you’ve got a great caption for it, send that to us as well.
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 here in Hong Kong and I was more than happy to help her out. I even invited her out to join some friends of mine for dinner later and she commented that she’s “always searching around for freelance gigs and it helps to talk to journalists and people looking for English-language writers.”
In my email I casually asked the reporter what the readership numbers of the China …
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 sweeping camera shots of the fluffy grey-cloud covered, green-treed environs of London’s SW19 that brings a rose-tinted mistiness to my eye every time.
I’ve just received the following press release release from the British Embassy in Beijing.
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.
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