China’s main English language newspaper, the China Daily published a story last week on the urgent attention that the city government and Olympic Organizing Committee are paying to the manners (or lack thereof) of Beijingers. Here’s how the article starts out: In addition to grand concrete venues for the 29th Olympic Games, Beijing is busy […]
Xinshou
A friend of mine recently bought a new car. Yesterday she called me up and asked if I wanted to join her and her husband to go antique furniture shopping. Well, that’s something I never pass up, so I said sure. We arranged for a place for her to pick me up and she told […]
Nai Nai Hao
Recently while in a nearby park with a friend, we saw two very cute little kids being pushed by their grannies in strollers. We stopped and chatted, and I said ni hao (hello) to the kids. One of the grandmothers smiled and prompted the kids, saying, shuo nai nai hao, whereupon my friend broke into […]
Wear More Clothes
The day before I left for Kashgar I made a phone call to the Northwest Airlines office in Beijing to make a change on my ticket home for Thanksgiving. I had called the day before to ask some questions and had talked to a very nice young man who had been very helpful. I told […]
A Yak Attack
On Saturday, Mike, Wendy, Alana, and I got into a hired car (with driver) and headed up into the mountains west of Kasghar. Our destination was Karakul Lake, along the highway that leads down into Pakistan. I, of course, would have loved to go all the way to the border, but it’s too far, and […]
A Silk Road Oasis
Last week I had the opportunity to travel to Kashgar, a city in China’s far far west. Kasghar is the major city in the southern part of the the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. In China, an autonomous region is a province where the majority of the population are a different ethnic group (as opposed to […]
