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The Chinglish Gallery

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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...
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Story Time: Prayers & Answers

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 own...
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Second Nature, Part One: 5 Habits You Pick Up In China

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This is not the first time I've been to China.  The first time I came was for five weeks in the summer of 2016 with an organization called ELIC .  After a week of orientation in Beijing, my six-person team taught two 10-day English camps for High Schoolers: one in Wujin, Changzhou and one in Changsha.  Now as I've returned to China for not even a full month yet, I've found myself already falling back into the habits I barely got comfortable with last summer.  Somehow it's just familiar enough to make the transition a little smoother. Never been to China before?  Going to China for the first time and curious as to what to expect culturally?  Here's a quick list of some habits you'll likely pick up (or be forced to pick up) in your first few weeks in country. 1.  How Do These Things Work?      This one's kind of a no-brainer.  The Chinese have been eating almost exclusively with chopsticks for thousands of years, so it...
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