Blog Tweaks, The General's Belly, and More!

Maybe you've noticed, or you haven't, but I've tweaked the page a little bit - I've moved around my Twitter feed, added some links to related posts, added a mobile version and a visitor map, and tweaked a few colors and stuff like that. Anyway, that's not terribly important, but anyway, just thought I'd let you know that I'm keeping up with maintenance.

Any suggestions for how I should change the page? Make it somehow more interactive or media friendly? Leave in comments!

Also, I finished "Fried Eggs With Chopsticks," and my verdict is that if you've never lived in China and are planning to undertake a tour kind of like hers, then this is a good book for you.

It's clever, funny, and really easy to read. Although, I have to admit, I was kind of annoyed at her during a lot of the book because it seems like she didn't prepare her language skills at all for the trip she was going to take in the interior of China by herself. You don't do that in China. It gives everybody a headache. I met a lot of people when I was in Lanzhou and in other places in China, and it annoyed me because they didn't know how things worked and weren't really bothering to try very hard to adapt to the culture and language. They were just trying to push their American ways onto the Chinese and expecting them to understand and deal with it, and getting pissed off when the Chinese people didn't understand. I was working my butt off to not do that, so it was pretty annoying to see her to that whenever she did. Anyway, rant done.

Anyway, on to the matter at hand, which is some interesting stuff I learned in the past couple of day, which include, but not limited to, the following stuff.

So, sometimes when you're walking along the street, particularly in the Northwest, I've noticed, you'll see dudes standing on the streets with their no shirts on or with shirts pulled up to just above their pudgy stomachs.


Yeah, not the prettiest picture, but I guarantee you that you will see it if you do any extensive traveling in China.


This is called The General's Belly. As you know, China has a history of famine and people going hungry, so a fat guy was pretty rare and was considered a symbol of wealth, just like in many other countries. It was a rarity in those times, but today they can be seen everywhere! Hooray!.........wait, no. It's great that fewer people are going hungry, but I don't know if I really want to be confronted with the naked pudgy truth just yet.

Another thing that I read about was that, according to the China Daily and Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, by 2006, the average person in Shanghai owned two mobile phones, 1.7 air conditioners, 1.7 color TVs, more than one fridge, and had a bigger carbon footprint than the entire UK. - from When a Billion Chinese Jump 

Talk about freaking development - if that's right, it seems like those Shanghai people are living it up more than Americans!

Next up, the world's oldest trees!

That's right, the oldest species of tree, if I am correct, is the Ginkgo, which comes from, you guessed it, China! Here's a couple of links to it: here and here.

Apparently the species has survived for something around 200 freaking million years!!! That's pretty bad*ss, if I do say so myself.

And lastly, the town of Dingxi (pron. "Deeng Shee")looks like a person!

I dunno.....I was talking to a friend of mine about her hometown of Dingxi, which is a city in central Gansu Province, and I looked it up on Wikipedia while I was chatting with her, and... 

BAM! 

Looks like a freaking person doing some stretch or Olympic pose or something like that.

There's nothing really deep there, I just thought I'd point it out to you.

Okay, so that's the end of the post!


...........................................


- "Wait, what? That's it? A couple of freaking facts and that's it?! What a jip!! Freaking cheat!!"

 - "Okay, hold on, I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation of why.....go ahead, what's up with that? Is that really the end of the post?"

...Yeah, sorry about that. Be back soon with something better, hopefully!

"Yeah, it'd better be good! Or we're leaving!"

Geez, okay.