The tag line of this blog is “Random Observations on Living Well Where You Don’t Belong.” Yesterday I observed something that is about as random as you can get. I was in a migrant village outside of Beijing, attending the opening ceremonies of a community center (more to follow on that in a later post). […]
High School Students in the 1980’s
The “Ministry of Tofu” website has posted some great photos of high school students in the 1980’s. They bring back some pretty powerful memories. Maybe it’s time for me to get out my 80’s photos…. Here is the explanation of the series, and one of the photos: A series of photos taken back in the […]
Exploding Watermelons
China has had a rough year when it comes to food safety. Whether it’s cadmium in the rice, melamine in the milk, arsenic in soy sauce, or borax in the pork, it seems like we have settled into a cycle of ‘food-safety-scandal-of-the-week.” This week’s scandal is exploding watermelons. Apparantly some farmers in the south have […]
Don’t Mess With the Grannies
This morning I had to make a run to the bank to pay a slightly overdue electricity bill. With a plan to arrive when the doors open at 8:30, I left my place around 8:15. It was a glorious morning for a walk. When I arrived at the ICBC (Industrial and Commercial Bank of China) […]
Changchun Railway Station
Recently I’ve been going through a bunch of my photos and slides from ‘the old days’ and ran across this photo of the Changchun train station I took when I lived lived there in 1990. It was built by the Japanese in the 1930’s when Changchun (then called Xinjing) was the capital of their ‘puppet […]
China by the Numbers
You may recall that in November of last year, China conducted a census. I wrote about my experience with the friendly (and generous) census-takers here and here. Last week, China released the official results of the 2010 National Census, and here are some of the more interesting numbers: 1.34 billion — China's total population. 73.9 […]
