Where to buy new year cards in Beijing

The spring festival is just around the corner and we decided to buy some new year cards for clients at last minute. But it turned out to be a very frustrating experience.


The post office had sold out all the new year cards. Watson’s, which used to sell greeting cards some years ago, no longer sold any today. Neither did the stationery store.

Yesterday I waited 25 minutes in minus 6 degrees to get a taxi and the 2.5km journey to Carrefour took another 20 minutes due to bad traffic in the evening. Unluckily, there were only a dozen Christmas cards left on the shelf.

Today I bought all the 32 cards available in a bookstore. But it wasn’t over yet. The cards were produced by Hallmark (there was a logo on the back of each card); while Hallmark channel is one of our competitors (I work for another entertainment channel). Ironic, huh!

Paper greeting cards have quietly withdrawn from stores or even peoples’ lives. I still remember the days when we would exchange new year cards with friends in the early nineties. And every year I would pick some beautiful cards for myself. I keep them till now.

California Dreamin'

All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray
I've been for a walk on a winter's day
I'd be safe and warm if I was in L.A.
California dreamin' on such a winter's day


Stopped in to a church I passed along the way
Well I got down on my knees and I pretend to pray
You know the preacher liked the cold, he knows I'm gonna stay
California dreamin' on such a winter's day


All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray
I've been for a walk on a winter's day
If I didn't tell her I could leave today
California dreamin' on such a winter's day
On such a winter's day, on such a winter's day

For the past 100 days, there hasn’t been a single drop of rain or a flake of snow in Beijing. It’s cold, dry and boring. It suddenly occurred to me why not go to the States for a break as I’d never been there. Last week I got my travel visa. So next stop: US.

An unhappy ending

The last workday of 2010 is over. Finally.

2010 ends with disappoints, disappointed with Beijing, with my job.

Over the past decade Beijing has grown more and more uninhabitable.

The number of automobiles in the capital has more than doubled since 2002, reaching over 4.5 million today and far outgrown road networks. Main roads are basically parking lots even at high noon, making traveling from one place to another an ordeal.

While car industry is booming, air quality is getting worse. (Beijing is notorious for that.) Besides car exhausts, “dirty industries” in the city and nearby provinces are major contributors. Thanks to “made in China”!

Despite the poor physical environment, house prices have tripled in the past 5 years. The population is swelling. There is nothing you can do without queuing: taking the subway; using an ATM; shopping at a supermarket and seeing a doctor… The list is endless; so is the queue. What’s more annoying is that there are some barbarians who don’t queue at all.

The megacity is eating away its residents’ lives day by day. Nevertheless, these factors cannot stop people from flocking in. Regional disparities in China are excessively large and resources are allocated to first tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai. As a result, manual laborers come along and college graduates remain here no matter how hard life is.

For my job, I’m very disappointed at my boss for not keeping her promise. Ai. Let it go…

Do we still need translators?

A few weeks ago I was helping a friend translate two college application essays from Chinese to English. The essays were about his travels around the world and they added up to 5,000 Chinese characters or so. He’d been to 40 countries and visited numerous scenic spots: the fjords of Sweden, Salamis of Cyprus, Santorini of Greece, the Bosphorus Bridge of Turkey… Many of the names were new to me, and under a tight deadline, I didn’t trouble to search them one by one. I copied and pasted the whole essay to Google translate and got a satisfying English version, which I would rate 6 or 7 out of 10. Then I corrected the grammar mistakes and trimmed some sentence structures. The essay was near perfect!

I hate to admit it but Google Translate has a bigger vocabulary than I and it’s strong in terminologies. It’s more frustrating to find that Google is able to do a better job than a translator.

For the time being, its weakness is in grammar. And the English to Chinese translation doesn’t work very well. But don’t worry. I won’t be surprised when one day Google translate replaces human translators.

Fish Tank

Fish Tank is a gruff and ruthless version of An Education. Both movies are the best I’ve seen this year.

不吐不快

出趟差累得像狗一样。

等电梯的时候旁边人的高跟鞋嘎达嘎达不耐烦地敲着大理石地面，公交车里的人吧嗒吧嗒地嚼着口香糖。

So damn annoying!!! Or what’s wrong with me?

本来以为板上钉钉的升职被莫名其妙地无限延期，而原来可能quit掉的同事却抢先一步。怎么都想不明白究竟怎么回事。

看来三年半，要么升职，要么滚蛋。

3 days in Shanghai

Candle lights flickered in the dark, as though they were dancing rhythmically to the music. Zpark bar must be named after Zhongshan Park. Again, we are in Shanghai, doing the same job, meeting the same people, staying in the same place.

11月初应该是上海最舒服的季节。这次顺路去了周庄。很小的一个景区，跟乌镇和西塘相比，并没有特别的地方。大概江南水乡都是这个样子，去一个足矣。没报希望，也就没有失望。

田子坊虽说是创意区，却被餐馆和酒吧占据了大半，空气中弥漫着炒菜的油烟味。本来就很窄的弄堂里挤满了各国游客，坐在户外吃饭的人就像动物园里的动物一样，成了照片背景的一部分。这里的感觉很像北京的后海。

现在全中国的城市似乎都一样，旅行几乎失去了意义。真是悲哀。