Six years ago this week I was in Shanghai. I don’t remember why, but I do remember wandering some of streets of the old city where I spotted these little chairs lined up outside a business. Just sunning themselves on a warm Spring day. Two things have always puzzled me: who put them there and why?
China By the Numbers
On March 5, Premier Li Keqiang delivered the 2016 government work report at the opening session of the annual National People’s Congress in Beijing. As government work reports go, it follows a very strict script: listing of all the glorious accomplishments of the past year and then setting forth all the glorious things that the […]
The Language Tree
I love language and infographics, so when I ran across this fantastic infographic depicting the major non-Asian world languages, I couldn’t resist. Here’s how it is described on the Matador Network: The manner in which languages evolve over time is immensely complex, and can be kind of difficult to understand. So linguists like to visually represent […]
A Bell in Larkana
Last week I received an email from a friend that had attached to it several pictures of a bell. They were taken by a friend of his who had recently been traveling in Pakistan and had come upon a bell in a church compound in Larkana, a city in the province of Sindh. […]
Regional Rivalries
We have a joke here in Minnesota: “What’s the best thing to come out of Iowa?” “Interstate 35.” Apologies to my Iowan friends, but I’m sure that you just turn the joke around anyway. An interesting feature of life in the United States is the rivalries that exist between various regions and states. Some rivalries […]
Friday Photo: Banquet Hall
China celebrates International Women’s Day every year on March 8. Usually what that means is women in the workplace are hosted to a lunch or perhaps given the afternoon off. When I taught at a university in China, my classes were in the morning, so I always felt a bit cheated when the school officials proudly announced […]
