Month: March 2009

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting article this week about the oddities of telling time in Xinjiang, China's westernmost province: Kashgar, a city of 350,000 built around an oasis along the old Silk Road, has two time zones, two hours apart. How you set your watch depends not only on the neighborhood, but on…

This afternoon I lunched with visitors at my new favorite restaurant in Beijing, Element Fresh. The tandoori chicken wrap is amazing.  After lunch I took them to visit a tea house run by a friend of mine. This 'tea house' is really a store front in a building that can only be described as a…

It rained a bit in Beijing last night.  I know because all the cars in my apartment complex were covered with big splotches of mud.  Springtime in Beijing. Gotta love it!

Lest we Americans think we have the market cornered on ingenuity or good old fashioned 'know-how,' we really need to consider our Chinese competitors. Newsweek recently ran an article about some very clever entrepreneurs who ply the banks of the Yangtze River in Wanzhou and give new meaning to the term Chinese Laundry: Reporter Nick…

We had a mini heat wave in Beijing this week, with temps climbing into the 80's on Wednesday. I think that might be some sort of record high for the date.  I have 3 random observations on the heat wave: 1.  You know it's hot when you spot a man standing on the sidewalk with…

I'm quite sure of one thing:  if the Twin Cities had smog like we had in Beijing today, the sirens would sound, the 'authorities' would order everyone indoors, and the National Guard would be mobilized to shoot on sight anyone caught outside, especially someone so foolhardy as to ride a bicycle (which is what I…