I've been trying to broaden my range of Chinese reading lately. Apart from the stuff I get at work it tends to be just newspapers, and even that's mostly limited to the more interesting parts of the 南方周末 and maybe 财经 or 中国新闻周刊 if I have the time. This week I got through [...]

I'd seen baijiu (like vodka, without the smooth taste) in plastic bags before (on the left). You get milk in bags in loads of countries it seems, but I'm not sure how widespread this form of packaging is for strong spirits.
I'm not convinced by beverages in bags though. It dribbles, it's difficult to put [...]

In KFC for a morning coffee (if anyone knows somewhere else that serves up a semblance of caffine at 8.20am near my house, let me know) and the woman in front of me in the queue asks . . ..
Are you hiring?
Are you looking for work?
Yes.
No. If you were a man, maybe, but we don't [...]

Been a slightly busier week than usual, as I got a couple of freelance translations to do. The first one was a document relating to a patent application, and was fairly hard to do - lots of obscure electronic bits relating to obscure mechanical bits, and then the relations of those obscure electronic and mechanical [...]

Chinese people1 are very fond of saying that China / Beijing / their hometown has four distinct seasons. I've never lived anywhere that hasn't got four distinct seasons so I find it odd that people need to point it out2. If you get onto Google, you can go as high as ten distinct seasons before [...]