When I rode up to my apartment building on my bycicyle this afternoon, the security guard smiled and greeted me, "You’ve just come back," he said. "I’ve just come back," I replied. That was it. I chuckled and though of how it is such a typical exchange in China. You see, the Chinese language has […]
Combines on the Third Ring
One of the great things about living in China is the unpredictability of things. Quite frankly, you never know what you’re going to see, and just when you think you’ve seen it all, you see something else that makes you do a double-take and ask, "did I really see what I think I just saw?" […]
Bingzi Walla
Forgive me for mixing my languages. Bingzi is a Chinese word for flat bread. Walla is Urdu for "man," as in someone who does something or sells something. When I was growing up in Pakistan, there were all kinds of "wallas" in our life: the fish walla, the meat walla, the vegetable walla, the fruit […]
Ren Shan Ren Hai
Ren shan ren hai is a Chinese 4 character idiom that means "a mountain of people, and an ocean of people." In other words, lots of people. And lots of people is something that this country has! Whenever I’m engaged in a conversation with a Chinese friend (or stranger, such as a taxi driver) about […]
Vinegar, Anyone?
I took a little jaunt this weekend to Shanxi Province to visit some friends in a city called Yuci. Like most cities in north China, it is connected to Beijing by rail, and getting there is an easy overnight train ride. We pull out at 9:40PM and arrive at 6:20AM. Get on, sleep, get up […]
Singing in the Park
Last weekend a friend and I grabbed our brand new cameras and headed off to wander through the neighborhoods between her house and mine. We ended up in a quiet park here on the west side of Beijing. The park’s main claim to fame is a giant pagoda, dating back to the 1300’s. But like […]
