November 2011
23 posts
“For me, turkey represents Thanksgiving more than anything because it can’t...”
– My friend An Xiao wrote about expat Thanksgiving for The Guardian, and told our crock pot turkey story is featured. United by turkey – and Twitter | An Xiao Mina | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Skittles
The green ones are green apple flavored instead of lime here. They don’t taste as good combined with orange and yellow this way…
On a Mission...for Turkey
We are ambitiously cobbling together our own Thanksgiving dinner with our neighbors the Paynes. We were resigned to roast chicken or even duck in our crock pot if we couldn’t find a real turkey. The Paynes were came back empty handed from our Mecca of foreign imports, Ole. But we held out hope today that Metro might be the one place in Chongqing likely to carry the big birds for the...
“The Connection Has Been Reset” - Magazine - The... →
Here’s an old, but still useful primer from James Fallows on the technical aspects of how China monitors and censors Internet traffic.
Favorite quote: “‘The unpredictability of the firewall actually makes it more effective,” another Chinese software engineer told me. ‘It becomes much harder to know what the system is looking for, and you always have to be on...
Zhong Courtyard Sees Foreigners Celebrate... →
“钟家院民俗艺术馆见小老外过生日抓周吃红蛋”
The Payne Boys’ birthday party made it to the local news! The Shapingba Minister of Culture joined in the festivities, and I’m sure he was eager to publicize a traditional customs spectacle such as this. I was pleased to see that the article uses a chengyu (four character idiomatic phrase) that I just learned in class, “入乡随俗” which...
On Chinese Names
The New York Times had an interesting article detailing the translation process for importing international brands into China, which involves both the phonetic and semantic translation names and meanings. “Consider Tide detergent, Taizi, whose Chinese characters literally mean ‘gets rid of dirt.’”
Much of what’s brought up in the article mirrors the decision making...
