PandaPassport.com – China Blog

Tomorrow night me and my brother are off to Beijing via an overnight sleeper bus. The overnight train was all booked unfortunately, but the bus should be fine. We’ll arrive Tuesday morning, and then we plan to head up to the Great Wall for the day.

Can anyone recommend a decent Great Wall tour?

If the temperature in Dalian is any indication, we’ll likely be facing some pretty nasty heat in Beijing.

As I said before, my brother is in town visiting and it’s been great fun so far. But it has given me an interesting perspective on my life here – watching him watching me, observing him observe how I live here.

But my brother has been surprised by my short temper when faced with certain day-to-day “China problems:”

Two ladies walk into an elevator, glance at us and start chatting:

Them: Those foreigners don’t understand what we’re saying.
Me: How the hell do you know?

We walk by a taxi, and the driver has a Ha-llo-orgasm:

Taxi driver: Hallo! Hallo! Taxi! Taxi! Hallo! HALLO! HALLO!
Me: You don’t think I saw you? You’re brain has a problem.

The China Mobile guy says he can’t get me GPRS service on my new phone:

Guy [in english]: No! no! no! (he then dismissively turns his eyes to nothing in particular off to the right)
Me: Wow, you’re really polite. Try smiling next time. It’s good for business.

A huge Sharpei dog (the size of a small horse) nearly kills my pekinese Pepe. It’s the second time that the Sharpei has attacked a dog in our building, but the owner keeps bringing it to the park area all the same:

Me: Is this your dog?
Owner: Yes.
Me: He just nearly killed my dog.
Owner: Sorry about that.
Me: Sorry doesn’t accomplish anything. This is not the first time your dog has attacked another. It won’t be the last. This dog is too big for these small apartments, it should be in the countryside.
Owner: Your dog should be in the countryside.
Me: You don’t know how to take care of dogs. You’re ridiculous.

Justified or not, I think I’m a little quick in my backtalk lately. Possibly due to a few bumps in the road here recently — well, more specifically a single bump — enough that might have made some pack it in and head back home. Me and my girlfriend are still considering that option. We’ll see.

But in any case, my Sino-fuse seems to have gotten shorter. And I think I’m gonna have to make a bigger effort at not extrapohating.

The trouble with taking the highroad in these situations is that it’s just not that easy.

Even when I feel justified in saying something back, or getting angry — I’m still not sure it’s the right thing to do.

Is it even worth the trouble?

Does it make a difference?

Maybe I should just move to Shanghai. I never hear John Pasden bitching about this kinda thing…

Well, I finally replaced my old Nokia cell phone. It had seen me through about 3 long and bumpy years in China, but I think it’s definitely time to set her out to pasture.

For a replacement phone, I went out on a limb and bought a Blackberry 7100 cell phone. Yes, a Blackberry in China. I wasn’t aware that you could get them in China yet, but apparently you can. Much to my surprise, a Chinese friend of mine had bought one. For 700RMB no less.

So yesterday I headed down to the cell phone market to see what I could track down. I walked up to the first lady-vendor:

Me: Got any Blackberries?
Lady: Ah? [looks questioningly at coworkers]
Coworker: Wait a minute, I know where to find one. [goes off to another stall]
(wait ten minutes)
Coworker: I’m back. Here ya go.
Me: How much?
Coworker: 7000RMB.
Me: Ha ha ha ha. I think you’ve been misinformed. It should be about 700.
(coworker goes off again, then returns)
Coworker: It’s 850RMB.
Me: My friend bought one for 700RMB. I can come back tomorrow with him, and get it for 700, or you can give it to me now. Is 700 ok?
Coworker: Ok, ok, ok. 700 is ok.

I hate bargaining…

I still need to play around with this phone a bit to figure out all the features. I still haven’t configured my email yet, but I’ll get to that later. I am a bit disappointed that I can’t send Chinese text messages, although there is a Chinese interface option in the settings. But I don’t send that many Chinese text messages all that often these days anyhow.

The China/Blackberry story has been an intriguing one so far. From tales of Chinese spies in Canada stealing Blackberry technology, to China Unicom producing a strangely similar Redberry device – it’s been an interesting story to watch.

Nothing China-related here, but this is just too funny so I’ll put it up anyway. This guy does a parody of David Blaine doing street magic, and it’s just so ridiculous you gotta check it out:

Anyway, my brother is finally in town, and I’ll be playing tour guide for the next two weeks.

But look forward to a review of Air China in the next week or two. The shit my brother got from them over the past two days during a delay in Beijing surpasses any other tom-fuckery I’ve seen from any airline ever.

Stay tuned…

Anyone who’s familiar with Chinese websites – especially Chinese chat forums (BBSs) – will know all about those crazy little animated emoticons. Yeah sure, you’ve seen emoticons in your MSN messenger before, but Chinese emoticons are especially messed up.

So messed up in fact, that I decided I just had to install this plugin:

CoolCode.cn Emoticons Plugin from Xenium and Andot.

Download Plugin directly (Zip)

Note: Normally I wouldn’t link directly to a file on someone else’s server, but as it’s hosted on a Chinese webpage, it might be impossible to find otherwise. Hope that’s ok guys.

Here’s a preview of the emoticons listed:

Installation:

• Upload the Emoticons folder to your plugins directory.
• Find this code:
  

• And just above that, insert this:
  if (class_exists('emotions')) {
emotions::bar();
}
?>
• Go to plugin management page in Wordpress, and click Activate Plugin

Issues:

For all the emoticons to display properly (all 60+ of them!) you need a fairly wide text column. Or else it might push your sidebar to the bottom, as it did with mine.

One workaround for narrow text areas:

I just chose the best 15 emoticons, and deleted the rest from the images folder included in the emoticon plugin directory. Maybe 60 is a bit much anyway… In any case, they now display sans probleme on just above my comments box (see below).

Good stuff.

UPDATED WORKAROUND: Reader Evitc provided this solution of modifying the CSS in the comments.

I’ve been running this one on my much neglected Chinese blog for months now, but I hadn’t bothered to install it over here.

I think it looks good. And they’re kinda fun too. Click the Comments link to test it out.

Incidentally, my WordPress theme, Hoofei, was created by a Chinese developer as well. Good to see China representin’ (far) East side when it comes to WordPress!

Has anyone else spent any time venturing into the wacky world of Chinese web development?

note: this command will work for windows users only

??o??? dn + ?l? + l??? ss??d ?s??ld ‘u???? dn ?p?s-????? u????s ?no? u?n? o? ???l p,no? ?? ‘?ou pu?

?o???u ?o? u uo????sqns
?ss?l?sn ?o? n ??pun ?l??

¡u?op ?p?sdn ?u?p??? ?? ??? s?osu?s ?s?u??? ??? poo? ?o? ??s s??l ???q?? ???? pu? ‘??u?pu?d?pu? u????? ‘?uo? unl?? ‘????ss?? ???nbs u??u?,u??? ???l ??n?s ?d?? u?? ? ?ou ‘??s

loo? ?x?? d?l?

l?s?no? ?o? ?no ?? ????? ?????? ?l???l ??n? ?pu?? ? s? ?? ?nq ‘?sod?nd l???????d ?u? ????s u?? ?? ?u??? ?,uop ? ?u?op-?p?sdn ?x?? ?no? ?u?dd?l? ?o? loo? ?l???l ??n? ? s,????

u?op-?p?sdn ?x?? ?no? d?l? o? ?o?

A quick update on some of my tech-related jottings over on CNET Asia.

• Driving in China: Some people actually do know where they’re going! – GPS Navigation in cars is not as uncommon as you’d think in China.
• Transformers: Here’s a robot you won’t see in the movie – From Great Wall Motors, a really neato little toy robot. Interesting photo.
• New Seven Wonders: Did the Great Wall make the cut? I hope not – See, pulling crap like this is gonna get me in trouble…
• I got your Sensitive Content right here! – Aggregated Content, & Getting around the Great Firewall.
• Meizu Minione M8: The Second Coming of iPhone – The Jesus-phone and it’s Chinese Anti-Christ.