Today (October 1, 2005–I’m in a different time zone) is the 56h birthday of the People’s Republic of China. But wait, you say, I thought China was an ancient civilazation with 5000 years of history! Well, that’s true, but the nation that we know today was founded 49 years ago, when Chairman Mao stood atop […]
Health Club
I bit the bullet and joined a health club this week. There’s one across the street from my housing complex (upstairs from the Hypermarket), so it really couldn’t be more convenient. Really, it’s just a gym — a large room with treadmills, torture contraptions that supposedly sculpt muscles, and a room for aerobics. Over the […]
Don’t Stand on Ceremony
This morning I attended a ceremony on the campus of Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT). The ceremony was to celebrate the 65th anniversay of the founding of BIT, one of China’s major universities of science and technology. Many former and current goverment leaders in China are graduates of this university, so they pulled out all […]
Collective Punishment, Chinese Style
This is something I wrote a year ago, but it’s still a good read: I live in a private housing development on the west side of Beijing. Private housing developments are a relatively new phenomenon in this "socialist" country, but they are beginning to sprout up around town (like weeds, actually, and with funny names, […]
The Great Mooncake Exchange
Today is Zhong Qiu Jie, (lit. Mid-Autumn Festival) in China. In colloquial terms, it’s called the Moon Festival, because it’s celebration coincides with the full moon. Much like Thanksgiving in American culture, Moon Festival is a time when people want to gather with their family members. If that isn’t possible, then people gather with classmates, […]
The Mountains are Out!
Most of the time, ‘beautiful” is not a word commonly used to describe the city of Beijing, my adopted home. It’s overcrowded. The architecture is out of control– ranging from Stalinist to classical Chinese, and often to some variations of the two. The traffic is terrible, and the sky is normally varying shades of grey […]
