Weekend photos
Location: Taiyuanjie, Shenyang
Camera: Diana F+
Experiments in Orientation
Posterous is now blocked by the GFW. Posting stuff is easy, editing posts is an annoying ordeal. Them's the commie breaks, I guess.
Filed under
china
Photo of the Day: CNN anchor meets umbrella foil. It's umbrella mania!
via shanghaiist.com
This is pretty funny. The video is pretty interesting as well, but it won't seem to embed. Check out this site or this site to view it. A list of many of the sites that are currently blocked and/or "down for maintenance" can be found here.
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BBQ Leftovers / Final Progress
Some photos from our BBQ with our new MBA students.
The social networking project that I gave to the students seems to be going OK. It's a bit complicated, but I think they understand the relevance. I totally didn't realize that Twitter has all these spam accounts, though. I just noticed that my students have a bunch of fake people following them, I'll have to remember to mention that in class. Only one student had a previous Twitter account
Today I set up a wireless network in class and planned to cover at least five different blogging and networking sites. We only got through Posterous and Twitter. Some had already tested Posterous, so we mainly discussed how some businesses use Twitter as a promotional/customer service tool. I wonder if universities in the West are doing case studies about this in class. I'm pretty good a this teaching/creating interesting projects thing.
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Bars and Boards
For part of my American Culture class, I taught some of the students how to skateboard. Then I went to the bar.
Camera: Diana F+
Location: Shenyang / Knight Leaders Bar
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Sex theme park prepares to open in Chongqing
Naked human sculptures, giant replica genitals, a photo exhibition about sex history and sex technique workshops. China's first sex-themed park has not even opened yet, but the controversial project has already got some people hot under the collar.
Love Land will open in October in the entertainment zone near the Yangtze River in Chongqing. Lu Xiaoqing, park manager, said Love Land would be useful for sex education and help adults "enjoy a harmonious sex life".
via chinadaily.com.cn
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Dragon Boat Festival Flare
May is a good month to live in China. Flowers are blooming, the weather is warm, and the sky in Shenyang is only moderately gray. May also begins and ends with holidays. We kick it off with the May Day / Labor Day holiday on May 1st and wrap it up with the Dragon Boat Festival (端午节).
The rainbow coalition of a bracelet I'm sporting now was hand made by one of my students and is one of the main traditions of the Dragon Boat Festival. From what I've been told, the bracelet is supposed to be secretly placed on the arm of some unsuspecting person while they're asleep. I don't wear much in the way of clothing when I sleep, so on the off chance that someone broke in to give me a Dragon Boat surprise, they'd be too horrified to come close enough to attach it to my wrist. The student just gave it to me before class.
Basically the idea of the bracelet is to wear it until the first rain after the festival, then throw it in a puddle. While you wear it, the bracelet continually sucks the bad luck out of your system (and, I assume, absorbs any external bad luck that you might imbibe through osmosis). When you cut it off and toss it into a puddle, it takes all that bad luck with it, leaving only the good, great, and mediocre luck behind. It is my assumption that the completely grotesque creek just north of our school and the undrinkable tap water in my apartment are direct results of bad luck puddle run off.
The more I think about it, the more I think there's something to all these traditions of good luck in the Chinese culture. You've got a billion people and a myriad of holidays all with their own good luck traditions. Add them all together and you go from an ostensibly undeveloped country to a world super power in fifty years. In America, all of our traditions are so selfish. Everything is a wish. And wishes are always so specific: win a sports care, meet a hot girl, cure your STD. Luck is so much more practical and it's because of it's generality.
"Hey, my crotch doesn't itch today. My luck is turning already!"
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