That Wai Guo Ren Life

Happy Weekend, guys! As you can see, the blog's got a very different look to it than before.  Blogger released some new themes not that long ago, so I decided to take one for a spin to see if it'll work better than the previous theme.  You'll likely see the blog going through a few changes here and there with layouts and colors, but never fear!  That's just my Marketing self never being fully content with keeping one design for long periods of time But that's not the main reason why we're here today.  Today's post is basically like reliving my favorite days when I was in school: video day! Below is a really awesome video about the 19 things you should never, ever do with chopsticks, made by the equally awesome guys at The Chen Dynasty.  They're two Chinese American guys whose channel is devoted to explaining Asian cultures (especially Chinese culture) to the world, and I know I've learned a lot from watching their videos.  You may have also hea

There are so many things I love about China: food, culture, history, landscape, cityscapes.  But so far I've been only posting about serious things, so today (like everyday, honestly) is a wonderful day to talk about the one thing in China that never fails to make me smile (and snort sometimes). In English, we call it "Chinglish."  Maybe there's a Chinese word for it - I don't know - but it basically just means that someone shoved some Chinese characters into Bing Translate and didn't bother to check if the English that came out actually made sense. Sometimes it's just unfortunate spelling errors. Sometimes you can figure out what they most likely were trying to say. Sometimes you got nothin'. Either way, it's super fun to see how two languages (Chinese and English, in this case) are so different that direct translation results in nothing less than pure shenanigans.  This post contains some of my absolute favorite examples of Chinglish th

Story Time! A while back a couple of coworkers and I decided to do something special for a friend's birthday, which for mei guo ren (Americans) often means going to a restaurant that serves Western food.  You can totally find almost any American "comfort food" here in China (peanut butter, Nutella, Frosted Flakes, Pringles, Heinz Ketchup, notice how my list is basically all junk food...), but it does come at a price.  An expensive price.  As such I often don't buy a lot of imported Western food (which is probably also better for my health as well as my bank account), but when it's a friend's birthday, hey, why not for one night? But I digress... This particular Western-style restaurant was actually run by some foreign friends, so it's not knock-off versions of hamburgers and fries.  That night we came in sort of late, so we were the only three customers there.  We were just flipping through the menu at our table when the restaurant owner suddenly lo