Monthly Archives: January 2013

Adventures in a Chinese supermarket

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I never make a trip to the United States without visiting a supermarket. To me they are more fascinating than any fashion salon.
 – Wallis Simpson
Instant noodle aisle in a Chinese supermarket - a culinary Mecca for uni students and MSG lovers everywhere.

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

– John Kenneth Galbaith

Soy Sauce at The Wu

I love foreign supermarkets. Forget national monuments, you want to get a real insight into a foreign culture, check out where the locals buy their toilet paper.

There are two supermarkets near our apartment. The noodle and soy sauce asiles above are from the huge and weird Wu Mart (“The Wu”), which is a massive supermarket downstairs (think Coles) and a shop upstairs, selling everything from bikes to thermal underwear (think K-Mart).

Breathing easy in pollution capital

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A few weeks ago DCR and I took a big step and did what many expats in China before us have done.

We opened our door to a new member of the family. An addition that makes us feel truly Chinese. Yes, we became the proud parents of… a Swedish air purifier. We have named him Lars. He’s so cute.

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Lars sucks up the muck in our apartment and makes us breathe a little easier, which is nice, but you can’t stay cooped up forever, and when we do step outside we are quickly reminded we live in one of the most polluted cities in the world.

The pollution in Beijing isn’t just bad – it’s awful. Even on days when the sky is blue, which to be fair, is more often than not, there is a sharp acrid smell in the air. As I write this I can feel the tight sensation in my chest that tells me the pollution is particularly bad today. Saturday was the worst day for pollution in Beijing on record. The Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center ranked the density of Particulate Matter2.5 as being over 700 micrograms per cubic meter. The PM2.5 index is considered “off the index” when it hits 500. The World Health Organisation considers 25 micrograms per cubic meter to be safe. Continue reading →

China LOL

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It was a amateur stand up night in a Beijing bar and a Canadian guy had just bombed out trying to get the international audiance to laugh at the names of “wacky” sounding Canadian towns. The MC was about to wrap things up when a Chinese girl, conspicuous among the mainly laowai crowd, put her hand up.

“Come on up!” The MC beckoned her on stage.

The girl, who looked like she was barely out of high school, nervously took the mic, giggled shyly and apologised for her broken English. The crowd smiled, encouraging.

The would-be comedian spoke with an ernest seriousness.

“You foreigners, you come to China, and some of you, you have Yellow Fever bad huh?” She began. Giggles from the crowd.

“And us Chinese girls, we think of our friends, ‘oh, you date a foreigner! That’s so cool!’ so you must think if we date you we think you are cool,” she continued, earnestly.

“But I ask my friend, I say, ‘why you date foreign guy?'” She paused and considered the crowd seriously.

“And my friend tell me: ‘Because they have big cock!'”

The crowd was momontarily stunned, but after a breif moment she received the biggest laugh of the night – partly because it was funny, partly … well, because no one expected the Chinese girl to make a cock joke.

Continue reading →