Beijing is crowded
What you think you will see:
What you actually see:
Travel
The anti-explosion ball
Your guess is as good as mine.
Running out of names for beer?
All we have left is numbers?
“333” brand beer in Vietnam
Managing expectations?
In Ho Chi Minh City.
The next time I feel poor,…
…I’ll check my bank balance using a Vietnamese ATM. Love that 20,000:1 exchange rate! 
Holy crap what’s that?!
No, it isn’t something from a Ripley Scott movie, it’s just another horrifying building in China.
Bonus points to the first person who identifies the train station.
Put the pee where it should be!
Urinals in a department store bathroom have these signs posted above, at eye level. Apparently there is a problem with accuracy, so these signs are an attempt to direct the pee to its intended destination.
You can lean in a little. Really, it’s no problem, you can lean in closer.
Even though you are full of self-confidence, please take a step forward.
What does a crowded train sound like?
One way to discover the strength of a society is to see how its people act when things go wrong.
The day before the new year holiday, we traveled down to the city of Tainan. Because of the big earthquake, the high-speed train was not running. Everyone who had tickets on the high-speed train (us) had the option of standing on the regular train. It was crowded and hot, and standing on the train was tiring. Nevertheless, all of the passengers behaved like civilized people. Passengers with seats gave them to women carrying babies.
We couldn’t believe how quiet everyone was. I shot a short video clip of inside the train car to show how civilized people behave under inconvenient circumstances. Turn up your speakers, because it’s hard to hear anything at all.
Now imagine what it would sound like in a similar train if this were shot on a train in a different country.
Tourism failure
We are on vacation in a new city. Being adventurous tourists, we want to try the local cuisine. Wandering around this morning, looking for breakfast, we saw a restaurant that seemed to be doing bustling business. There were a lot of people inside, workers seemed to be fussing over their open pots, steam was everywhere, it was your stereotypical Chinese breakfast place.
We were a bit puzzled over the choices of dishes. Most things didn’t seem to be typical breakfast offerings. It was strange even for China. But we are on vacation, we thought. Let’s not let our prejudices get in the way of meal adventure. So we ordered several dishes and began our breakfast experience.
We were unimpressed. The food didn’t taste very good, and it was expensive. We paid over US$10 for the two of us, which by China standards is a scandalous sum to pay for breakfast. Worse, we weren’t full.
We left our food half-eaten (and less than half-enjoyed), and slouched out of the restaurant, feeling like tourist failures. We can’t live like locals! we mourned. We are hopelessly in a rut! We are cultural snobs and look down on everyone who isn’t like us! We are terrible people!
That’s when we saw Pizza Hut.
Like many American fast-food companies, Pizza Hut has done a good job of localizing their menus. A customer in America would hardly recognize the menu. Significantly, Pizza Hut in China has a breakfast menu.
Slightly ashamed, we slunk inside, shuffled to a booth, and reluctantly opened the menu.
Oh, my! Â They have oatmeal! And French toast! Yummy yum yum!
As a concession to being in China, we got soybean milk 豆漿 instead of orange juice. And we feel like tourist failures, but at least we have happy tummies.
So it snowed in Nanjing
I always like the day after a snowfall. The sun comes out, everything looks clean, covered with a blanket of fresh white snow, against a blue sky.
This is the Yuejiang Tower 閱江樓 in Nanjing å—京.
Click the photo for a full-sized view.