Chinese brands

Even though the English on billboards, traffic signs and other public publishing media are improving rapidly, it is still possible to find some very interesting translations of Chinese words and sentences into English (a hobby of many expats in China by the way).

Also, one visit to a department store will get you in touch with a great number of brand names that you previously had never heard of before with wonderful names.
One of the nicest I have seen so far is the "G-Point" (see picture). It is a chain, I believe. I can already imagine the following conversation:

"Do you know where the G-point is?"
"There are many! Which we one do you like the most?"
"I like them all, but my boyfriend cannot find any"

The name could have been one step nicer, "G-spot", but you cannot have it all ;-)
Another example I saw the other day was a badminton racket. "Entire people practise athletics 5501" was the model.

Who invents those names? Does the process of deciding on those names involve many people and endless discussions, like in Europe? If I find more interesting examples, I will share them with you.

Fuzhou street life

One of the most irritating, dangerous, annoying, but also interesting things about Fuzhou is the traffic situation. I wrote about it already more than once. I also don't want to keep reporting about it, but there are simply so many unbelievable traffic situations here that we experience on a daily basis, I decided to make some pictures of it every now and then. You can find them in the set "Fuzhou street life" in Flickr.

Here an example of a situation I saw the other day. This one was pretty serious; we see accidents almost every day here, but is not often that we see vehicles that landed on the roof after an accident.

Flickr Pro

After receiving several complaints that we are not sending enough pictures, I decided to upgrade my Flickr account. At least for the coming year, I will be able to create an unlimited amount of photo sets. Together with the fact that uploading pictures to Flickr is much easier now with our new iMac, you can be expecting to see more photos here. I hope you will like them.

Moon festival

Last week, on 25 September, was Moon Festival, or Mid-Autumn Festival, one of the most important Chinese festivals. On this day, the 15th day of the 8th month (according to the lunar calendar), the full moon is at its brightest. And as the Chinese are very much fond of the moon, they celebrate this day with a special festival. The origin of the Mid-Autumn Festival seems, as many other Chinese festivals, not completely clear. Quite plausible to me is the explanation that the Chinese originally celebrated the harvest on that day. And what better day to celebrate it than during a full moon night?

Of course, on the evening of the Moon Festival, a special dish is eaten. This one is a particularly interesting one for me, because as far as I have been able to investigate, almost no Chinese likes the Moon Festival speciality: the moon cake. The funny thing is that before the festival, beautiful gift packages of moon cakes are spread by almost everyone, where in fact nobody actually eats them. And they are not cheap! I got a few boxes that probably costed at least 200 RMB per box (20 Euro). The Sheraton in Beijing had a big problem this year, as it was found after an official inspection that the moon cakes they had been selling, did not meet the required quality regulations, as defined by China's food authorities. I don't want to know what happened to the person responisble for the moon cake project this year in the Sheraton.

Another tradition is that on many places, quizzes are organised. Many question cards are hung on a line for everyone to see. On these cards, questions are written down. The one who comes up with and presents the right answer the quickest to a jury, wins a small prize. The questions often require quite a bit of knowledge about Chinese culture and language. They reminded me a lot of the questions you have in Trivial Persuit. Also in our cantina, a quizz was organised. Sadly though, I was not qualified enough to even try to answer one of the questions. Better luck next year???