I couldn't resist the cover of this 1993 book on AIDS prevention. The characters across the bottom read 'hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, do no evil', although a closer look at the gentlemonkey on the right will leave you in little doubt as to exactly what kind of evil it is [...]

Cadre A: Comrade, we still have significant funds in the city beautification account
Cadre B: Well, there's the underside of a bridge over the canal near my apartment that's looking a bit rundown.
Cadre A: Ah yes, is that the one carrying the big wide road with inadequate pedestrian crossings?
Cadre B: Yes, with the pot-holed pavements . [...]

If I had a very short amount of time to show someone Beijing, I wouldn't take them to the Forbidden City. Nor the Great Wall. I wouldn't even feed them Peking Duck, much less Peking Opera. And not beer by Houhai, either.
I'd put them in a midnight taxi with the craziest driver I could [...]

One of the nice things about Beijing, and I guess any city, is that you can be walking down a noisy street dodging manholes missing covers and middle-class middle-schoolers on their mountain bikes, turn your head to the left to check there's no traffic too likely to hit you as you cross the road and [...]

As part of my job, I often spend quite a bit of time looking at specialist websites for just the right bit of vocabulary. Today, I came across the extremely specialist Manure Happenings, which I recommend to all of you who are interested in, y'know, like, shit. . .

I went to a 'Chinese corner' at my Chinese teacher's house at the weekend. The idea being that all his various students got to meet each other and practise their Chinese.
It's a pretty odd idea, speaking Chinese to a bunch of other foreign folk when you live in a country of 1.x billion Chinese [...]