One week away from bloody hot, sweaty Shanghai. One week in good old Kunming where coffee is 5 kuai, food is 1/3 the price and shoe shiners are everywhere.
Wish you all a Happy Golden Week and don’t forget to spend, spend, spend..

The Shanghai government is not very amused with all those new, modern words, mostly abbreviations, that have become part of the online vocabulary of young urban Chinese.
The government plans to “forbid the use of a series of new words and abbreviations made popular on the Internet, from both the schools and official documents,” […]

Shanghai has apparently published an illustrated guide, called “Recognizing Phonies” to help the citizens and visitors to distinguish real beggars from frauds. Although I have no idea whether it’s available in English it will be a sad read indeed.
“Amid the great army of city vagrants, there is a cadre of professional beggars who prey […]

Random thoughts on eating in China for more than 3 years now.
The Xinjiang restaurant in Shanghai offers sheep balls. Great food although no by effects
This spring snake was on the menu in Yangshuo. It was hunted when we ordered, showed to us alive and for the photo-op we held it for a while. The […]

Not so long ago regulations for allowing foreign investment in Chinese media companies were curbed. Basically reversing one year old Chinese regulations that opened up this market a bit.
One of the bigger foreign media players, Newscorp, has already some ventures in China. They have a license to operate in Southern China’s […]

The big October break is coming and today I read the official announcement.
For all those westerners with their fat holidays I wonder how they would react if they get 5 weekdays but have to hand back the weekend.

or at least prices that come closer to what they should be.
Friends in my age group are still in their marriage stage, which follows the dating, living together for a bit, moving on and now wanting to really settle down period.
Flying back to Holland for all these events would be a […]