This post is a follow-up to the news story of the week. So to peak your interest, here are a couple of fast food advertisements I found here in Nanjing. First I present to you a McDonald’s ad that I carefully sheltered from the debris of our meal. My poor wife was more than a bit embarrassed. The father is thinking “You have one, I have one too [...] Keep reading »

This week’s story has me scratching my head. Apparently a lot is going to change between now and 2030, when supposedly 2/3 of China is going to be overweight. Now I’m not saying that Chinese people aren’t getting bigger, they are. When I arrived in 2007 people were complaining that McDonald’s and KFC were making the children [...] Keep reading »

When I talk about Guangxi, I find myself talking about “the students,” but I realized I haven’t properly introduced them to you yet. For the next few days I’m going to try to give you a view of what it’s like to grow up in rural China by highlighting some of the stories they’ve told me. After that I’m going to take a little time to in [...] Keep reading »

It’s been a wild first month of blogging with just over 1,400 hits. Like I mentioned yesterday, I ended up on a Chinese blog, and I was asked to write a short article for a Polish website about my time in the countryside. I am planning to expand the variety a bit in the next few months. I’m working on convincing a friend to write a recurring co [...] Keep reading »

I’m not exactly sure how these things happen, but the other day my blog post got put up on a Chinese website (the section was later deleted). The title of the article had been translated pretty well. The name got translated to “China Sees Red,” which isn’t quite what I take it to mean, but its close. The post there led to some interesting d [...] Keep reading »

This week’s story is more of a reminder perhaps than breaking news. China’s People’s Daily led with an article today titled “Year of extreme weather shows reality of climate change.” I wanted to link to this article because it really is interesting the things China has never had a public debate about. So for example, C [...] Keep reading »

I would have written this post yesterday, but some how sitting in my office all day, didn’t help me remember that it was a “holiday.” So last night I planned on taking a bunch of photos and videos for you all to enjoy, but then, nothing happened! At our school that sets of fireworks pretty much weekly, there was nothing to see. We [...] Keep reading »

This morning I was in a bad mood. I had just received word that China had announced that it would be blocking voip services like Skype. I’m not sure if you are familiar with Skype, but for expats like me it serves as the lifeline. If I want to call my parents, or see my niece and nephew, or talk to pretty much anyone, I use Skype. As you may know [...] Keep reading »

When people ask me what the best place in China is, I usually say the terracotta soldiers, or the whole city of Xi’an, but that’s a lie. I tell them this because most of the time they are looking for a place they can actually visit in their few weeks in China. Really my favorite place in the whole of China is in Longzhou on a noisy little corne [...] Keep reading »