At least on the surface, people are relaxing more and more here. There aren’t as many masked faces in the street anymore, and despite a constant barrage of banners, posters, pamphlets, war-rhetoric slogans,* and public-service announcements about “improving personal hygeine to battle an epidemic situation” on the radio, people have gone back to hawking and [...]
bokane.org
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Category Archives: Articles
sars diary
It is the start of April when I hear from a friend that a case of SARS has been found in Harbin. It’s rumour-mill stuff, of course; the papers don’t report it, it’s not on the news, and there is most certainly no official mention of it. But Adam, Ben, and Sirena’s school posts a [...]
boschian
The fact that almost all of the commercials on Chinese TV are for some kind of medicine or another would make one think that health was first and foremost on the People’s consciousness, and yet the People spit, cough, and sneeze everywhere, with no regard whatsoever for where they are, what they may have, or [...]
atypical noodles
[NOTE: My site is already blocked in China anyway, for some inscrutable reason or another, so I'm just going to say what I really think here.]
When SARS first broke out in Guangdong last November, I paid no attention to it - it was far away, and if it ever got serious, I figured, the government [...]
e quindi uscimmo
(The last two overdue National Day entries will be coming soon.)
I hate cold weather. That’s part of the reason I decided to come to Harbin, I guess: some perverse desire to see what one of the famously cold Manchurian winters would feel like.
Truth be told, the cold isn’t really the worst part; it’s cold, sure, [...]
holidays (part 2)
(continued from the previous entry)
So we knew not to go to Blue’s for dinner on Christmas Eve. That left us with something of a quandary: should we go to the Holiday Inn (the only other game in town for Western food) and pay extortionate prices for a set meal? Or should we do nothing?
And then [...]
holidays (part 1)
We were all really looking forward to Thanksgiving. Blue’s Western Restaurant was advertising* an “authentic home-style Thanksgiving dinner,” and the prospect of turkey, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce - oh, god, cranberry sauce! - was just too tempting to resist.
So we all met up - Adam, Ben, Blake, Daniel, Natasha, and I - at Blue’s [...]
heat and noise (bar street revisited)
Renao literally means “heat and noise,” and is the Chinese word for “lively, exciting, fun.” In Chinese, most nouns can be verbed and all verbing can be adjectived, and re’nao is no exception: South Sanlitun has renao, is renao, and is where you go if you want to renao*.
The Black Sun Bar, in the Chaoyang [...]
blade runner with bicycle rickshaws (part 2)
I didn’t like Shenzhen at all.
It’s the success story of the New China - built with foreign and local investment; big, flashy, new. People come from all over China to make their fortune, and so even though Shenzhen is in a Cantonese-speaking region, Mandarin* is the lingua franca here.
At first glance, it’s an impressive, cosmopolitan [...]
blade runner and bicycle rickshaws (part 1)
Attention: I’ve been teaching supplementary summer classes for the last two and a half weeks, and will begin teaching regular classes on 2 September - tomorrow. There’ll be a new update (probably the second half of this post, which has been harder to write than I’d expected; possibly a completely different post) by Wednesday, 4 [...]