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 …
This was actually game two for the day, but it’s hard to work a half-day in Suzhou, jump on a two hour train and get to the Nanjing Olympic Stadium (no Olympic events have been or ever will be staged here, by the way) in time for a 2 pm game. Plus, Chico and I had bought tons of beers and the security guards made us finish them outside, so that took a little while.
Upon entering the arena I was surprised at how modern it was and how it reminded of a 1980’s NBA stadium all at the same time. This place had the look and feel of the old Oakland …
After wandering the halls of the China blogsphere for a few years now, it generally takes a pretty unique China-themed site to raise my eyebrow. ChinaSMACK is just such a site.
Essentially the site digs up, translates and reposts all the shit and sludge, peppered liberally with the plain weird, that are hot (or “viral”) topics in the Chinese-language Internet (blogs, bbs, etc.).
The site is well summed up by its tagline:
“Viral Chinese internet stories, pictures, & videos, translated. See what’s so popular, sexy, scandalous, or shocking behind the Great Wall”
I remember back in the early days of the net me and my high school buddies couldn’t get enough of the site rotten.com …
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 …
Last summer acclaimed documentary filmmaker Tan Siok Siok headed out into the streets of Beijing with a rather ambitious goal of capturing the essence of the city and its people the summer before the Olympics.
The result is Boomtown Beijing, a film that paints a picture of not just a city or the sporting event that it will play host to - but rather how a singular event has inspired people to do what in the past was so difficult and dangerous - dream.
The documentary follows the story of three Beijingers - an 11-year-old boy who hopes to be an Olympic torchbearer, a street sweeper looking to put together …
There’s this spot on my university campus that we’ve taken to calling “The Makeout Garden.”During the day it’s like any spot of green on the grounds of the ivory tower – a blip of green to contrast with the blase bathroom-tiled buildings of academic boredom. It’s full of elderly people performing taiji and students sprawled out sleeping during the morning and afternoon, but as soon as the sun goes down, it turns into a live re-enactment of an AXE commercial.
And I’m not really surprised.All of my students have at least three to five other roommates.They need to go somewhere.If it’s not The Makeout Garden, then it could be any of the “love …
Should any Beijing Laowai have a free schedule tomorrow and wish to support a fellow foreigner in his bid to show a national TV audience that he’s got some guanxi too, while also helping raise awareness for a charity that secures micro loans for poor rural women, please read the following from American expat, Henry Winter:
I am competing in a national TV reality show called “Win In China” [site in Chinese] - it’s a lot like The Apprentice. We started with 150,000 candidates, and now only 11 are left. I am the first foreigner ever to be on the show, which the show producers frequently point out on air….
I’ve long been a fan of ChinesePod.com, a site that offers free mp3 podcasts for learning Mandarin. Having used various aspects of the site for nearly the entire time I’ve been in China, it was with a lot of interest that I read the company being mentioned in the New York frigin Times!
In my line of work, I tend to see a LOT of Internet start-ups with grand ambitions quickly fade into nothing, so to me it’s cool to see a business that’s not only flourishing, but being recognized for what it is - a leader in melding technology with cutting-edge learning practices.
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.
I look...
Subscribe to our feed