I found this fun shirt on Taobao: I love characterplay but I found this shirt, while clever, a little whiny. So I checked the seller for other designs like this, but this was basically the only one of this kind. The post Zheeeeeen Leeeeei appeared first on Sinosplice ..read more

I always liked how people in Japan stood on one side of the escalators and let those in a hurry clomp on up or down the other side. It seemed courteous and efficient. At some point, years ago (maybe around 2010?), Shanghai also implemented such a system. Signs went up. I was told that Shanghai was adopting Hong Kong’s escalator etiquette. In any case, I saw it as progress. Sadly, it didn’t last long. The system was abandoned after less than a year, as I recall. I never knew why. On my last trip to Japan (March 2024), I discovered that Kyoto and Osaka are now discouraging the “stand on one side ..read more

Last Friday I went to a production of Sleep No More (不眠之夜) here in Shanghai. My wife bought us tickets. Although she has a pretty good record of choosing this kind of live entertainment, for some reason I was expecting something boring. Sleep No More is definitely not boring. In this immersive theatre experience, the audience disperses and wonders through sets covering 5 floors while the cast act out various scenes across all 5 floors. There is no dialog and there is no way to see everything. You have to choose which characters to follow, where to go, and hope for a little luck. Going with fr ..read more

The first week of October is still China’s “National Day Golden Week” holiday, meaning that we get 7 consecutive days of vacation October 1-7. Of course, such a treat can’t come without a bit of pain… in this case, we also had to work the weekend after to “make up for” some of the days off. Truly a maddening system. A seven-day workweek following the holiday really does come close to nullifying the whole point of the holiday for many. For the October holiday this year, I went on a trip with my family to Yangshuo (阳朔), a mountainous region near Guilin full of all kinds of outdoor activities. Ac ..read more

Hello to my email subscribers (if you’re still there). I’ve been hacked in a way that is only visible to my email subscribers. Spam messages are going out through WordPress.com email notifications. I’m working on fixing it, but unfortunately this happened right when I went on vacation to Yangshuo with my family. Will try to solve it ASAP! The post HACKED appeared first on Sinosplice ..read more

My original hometown may be Tampa, Florida, but my family relocated from there to Atlanta, Georgia in 2020. So this past July, I was finally able to take my whole China-based family to visit this new “home base” in the US. It was great to be back with family for almost a whole month after being unable to visit due to COVID for about 4 years. I won’t say too much about the visit, other than that it was really nice. I’ve been taking a break from blogging this year, and we all had a great time. Chinese did randomly intrude on our vacation, though, such as in this graffiti I spotted on the Atlanta ..read more

Years ago, I blogged about Mobike and how it was changing the way we commute in Shanghai. That’s old news now. COVID has come and gone (sort of). But we’re still using these shared bikes. Now there are two big names: Meituan (unlock the bikes by scanning their QR codes with WeChat) and Hello Bike (unlock the bikes by scanning their QR codes with AliPay). These shared bikes are all over the city. Sometimes there are so many of them in one area that a sidewalk will be completely blocked. In order to redistribute the bikes in a useful way, you often see big trucks collecting the bikes from an are ..read more

I think rate of speech is one of those things that gets some attention at certain points in one’s studies (especially the beginning), but easily gets forgotten under mountains of vocabulary, tsunamis of pronunciation, and avalanches of grammar. Here’s a You Can Learn Chinese podcast from last month where we discuss how rate of speech stays relevant at different stages of one’s studies: Teachers’ rate of speech (super important in the beginning) Dangers of not adapting to a natural rate of speech in one’s studies Looking for the right rate of speech for input Keeping goals in mind Using softwa ..read more

I got back from a family trip to Lijiang (Yunnan) last week. It was quite interesting being there again when my first and only trip to Lijiang happened a full 20 years ago! (Yeah, yeah… I’m old!) I remember even then that some tourists were lamenting that Lijiang was “too commercialized.” Obviously it’s more commercialized now, but I still found it nice. One big difference is that while I used to see Naxi women in the “old town” of Lijiang wearing their traditional clothing selling food, clothing, and trinkets, I no longer do. Instead, it’s lots of tourists (mostly young women) decked out in r ..read more

I stopped writing in late 2022 because I didn’t want to turn this blog into a big whine-fest about COVID, and as a result, in a time when COVID in China was impacting every single aspect of my life, I found myself with nothing to write about. I’d get an idea to write about “little signs of hope” and all the ways that people in Shanghai were subverting rules and letting normalcy seep into our lives here, but then there would be some COVID resurgence and everything would go the other way, and the whole “I don’t see how we are ever going to break out of this endless cycle” mentality of despair wo ..read more