The restaurant owners (see ambiv’s post, below) are fighting back, but it’s clearly a losing battle. In front of each of the restaurants now hangs a protest banner, white with black characters: “High Honesty Supermarket, give back our blood-sweat money!” “You illegally cut off our electricity, and treat tax-paying people like convicts!”, and so on.… Continue reading Mobocracy update
Author: dubyruby
Cost-of-war counter
I would have posted this over on Lumpenlogogracy, but for some reason I’m having trouble signing in there. I happened across this site this afternoon that counts the cost to US taxpayers of the war in Iraq and calculates for you how much that would buy in kids’ health insurance, public education, college scholarships and… Continue reading Cost-of-war counter
Everyone knows it’s windy
So I’ll break the weeks-long silence on our blog by talking about the thing people are always talking about: the weather. At the moment we are emerging from the bone-dry Beijing winter into the gusty, dusty Beijing spring. Spring is a very windy time here, and for the past few days the cracks in our… Continue reading Everyone knows it’s windy
Hapless rooster newlyweds
Oh no! It turns out we were married in an unlucky year: the Chinese are apparently calling 2005, the Year of the Rooster, the “widow year” because the last month of the lunar year had only 29 days, instead of 30. So everyone’s waiting for the Year of the Dog (starting January 29th) to get… Continue reading Hapless rooster newlyweds
We’re back!
We’ve just returned from a trip to the south, a classic China-travel whirlwind featuring three overnight trains and one overnight bus all in the space of a week and one day. Each day of our travels the words “peak season” rang in our ears more loudly and ominously, as tickets from one place to another… Continue reading We’re back!