Tomorrow morning I’ll depart this metropolis that seems to be suffocating under a blanket of toxic haze and head to Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes. I’m looking forward to hanging with my family, playing with my mom’s cat, and cleaning out my lungs. When I’m in Minnesota, I like to just stand outside and […]
Quick! Come and Look!
Last month my work took me to the city of Qufu, in Shandong Province. Qufu is famous for being the hometown of Confucius. In an effort to preserve the cultural heritage of this city, it has been spared the mindless development and modernization that has transformed most Chinese cities into oversized clusters of white tile […]
Exploding Air-fresheners??
The Xinhua News Agency reported yesterday that the government is calling a halt to the sale of a certain brand of air freshener that has a tendancy to explode: The Beijing authorities have suspended the sale of a brand of air freshener that has reportedly triggered three explosions. The air freshener, going by the brand […]
Sweating Eyeballs
Summer has arrived in Beijing. Big-time, with high temperatures and high humidity and high heat indexes and layers and layers of smog! It will pretty much be like this for the next three months. Last night a friend and I attended a concert at a local church. It was so hot inside the sanctuary that […]
Is That Civilized Behavior?
Guess what, folks. The Olympics are coming to town! Perhaps I’ve mentioned that before. In fact, it’s only 430 days away! The already frentetic preparations are starting to pick up steam. There are stadiums to be built, roadways to be expanded, subways to be dug, songs to be written. And then there’s that pesky thing […]
