Top articles
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huit ans
Well, first of all, congratulations to South Africa. It's good to see the World Cup back on the right side of the equator. But more importantly: Today is my eighth chinaversary. Eight years ago today I arrived in China for the first time. In Changsha,...
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infuriating
I thought, based on its performance over the last couple of days, that our internet here at BeiGongDa was back to normal. Then this evening it was back to the same infuriating shit I had to put up with last week- actually worse. Then I got offline and...
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am I the only one who sees something wrong here?
It's not the first time I've ranted about this particular phenomenon in modern Chinese society, so I'll tone it done and keep everything as reasonable and rant-free as possible. Tell me: Am I the only one who sees anything wrong in this situation? I walk...
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l'impromptu de BeiGongDa
Today was drama tests for my first year students. It's simple: They get into groups of their own choosing, write or adapt or copy a drama of their choice, then act it. I give the group a grade. That's it. Well, one stuck out in particular, one that I'll...
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fog
As if yesterday's fog wasn't bad enough... When I got up at 6:30 this morning it looked like it was still midnight, or as if we'd suddenly been fast-forwarded to mid-winter. I stumbled into the lounge room and looked out the window... or tried to. Yesterday...
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fog, still
This morning didn't so much dawn as wade through the thick fog that is still shrouding Beijing. I thought I'd woken up absurdly early, it was so dark, but checked the time and saw that it was actually quite a reasonable time to be awake. Not good. Very...
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rambling again
First up: Some food for thought. Now on to the rambling: I was only planning on ducking into the office to check what time my Monday class was. Because with this teacher from Oz is here for these three teaching weeks, my schedule is all up the wop, so...
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clear
Good recipes. I just need to work on the execution a little. Especially the 家常豆腐. I'm not used to going from deep-frying to regular frying in one wok, and so I wound up with far too much oil. And I was in too much of a hurry, so the plan I had all carefully...
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back
We're back after three cold days in Yanqing. I mean, that wind was great, but it really dropped the temperature, and combine that with the gain in altitude and absence of Beijing's heat island, and it was just a tad on the chilly side. Winter has finally...
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cheats, but good cooks, still
Well, something I have come to consider desperately lacking in the English-language China blogosphere is foodie blogs. It's not that such blogs don't exist, it's that they should, and I have only recently begun discovering them. There should be far more....
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another loss
And so Hone Tuwhare has also passed away. Damn, he was by far my favourite New Zealand poet. Well, no, just plain one of my favourites. He was a boiler maker by trade with not terribly much in the way of formal education, but he was a natural poet who...
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bloody fakes
Two in as many days! The one annoying thing about last night's dinner was the taxi driver who brought us home. He started off by talking absolute horseshit about how he was really glad to see a Chinese person get in the car, because foreigners are so...
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no direction home
I watched Martin Scorcese's No Direction Home: Bob Dylan yesterday afternoon. It was one of those days towards the end of a frustrating week that couldn't end early enough, I needed to get a little time and space somewhere far away for an afternoon. It's...
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families
I still haven't taken lzh to New Zealand- I know, I know, I'm long overdue for a trip home, and she needs to see my homeland and meet my family- and so the only other Waughs she has met are Shushu and my parents. They're the only other Waughs to have...
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cab conversations
I didn't want to go out this afternoon, but a colleague who is about to head home for the summer holidays (you read that right: She's also a Kiwi) wanted translation help buying gifts of an electronic nature for family back home. And so I wound up going...
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road tripping
Like I said last night, the weekend meant spending an awful lot of time sitting in the back of miandis. Half of that time was spent on more or less normal tripping around Yanqing, to and from the county town, although the first trip, from Dongguan up...
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oh, and...
This is not the same as the post of the same title on my main blog, but it's essentially the same clarification. I know more than one person has noticed I maintain two virtually identical blogs. This one is my "permanent backup", the site I maintain in...
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a circuit of Pandaomiao
Considering that roughly half my time in China has been spent in Beijing, and roughly half the time I've spent in Beijing has been spent in this southeastern corner, around BeiGongDa, it should be kinda surprising that I'd never really explored that small...
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grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Really, how much technical trouble do I have to put up with in two days? First it's destroying the bathroom ceiling in the process of changing two ridiculously stupidly hard to remove light bulbs. And then, well, the university supplied big ugly box computer...
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not such a wild goose chase
I dislike the noisy, crowded, touristy places. I love the boring places. The boring places, the ordinary, every-day regular parts of town where the faceless masses of ordinary people live and work and play, are by far the most interesting places to be....
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garhhh
I never would've thought changing two lightbulbs would turn into such a mission. First one light in the bathroom went out. No big deal, we still had the other light, which was more than adequate. But as much for form's sake as anything else, I pulled...
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gah
It's a pity that today has to end on such a sour note. I mean, a day in which this cold Ma passed on to me is taking hold, and when lzh presses the buzzer and I let her in the main door downstairs, I hear the old Canadian guy who lives downstairs hurling...
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山楂酒
Alright, don't ask why, but... I'm drinking haw wine. See, there's a little convenience store just up the road and they've had two kinds of fruit wine on their shelves for a while now, both made by 丰收, although I can't remember what the other fruit wine...
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jiaozied
About four yesterday afternoon Ma gave me a bowl of jiaozi and said, I can see you're hungry, so eat these now, then when Ba gets back eat some dishes and drink with him. Ok. And of course, I had a not-quite-full-bowl of jiaozi to chase down the baijiu...
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back
We're back in Beijing. We were delayed a day. Yesterday was windy and cold, and lzh didn't want to venture out into that kind of weather- never mind that we would've spent most of the journey safe and warm inside a bus. Oh well, I wasn't in any hurry...