Tag: chinese
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Day Two Hundred Seventy One, October 20, 2011
Go to any Ikea store in China and you are guaranteed to find at least 10 people (I have once counted over 50 people) sleeping, lounging, chilling with shoes off, reading books, listening to music, on the sample furniture. They appear to come for their lunch breaks and just really shut down and take a…
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Day Two Hundred Sixty Eight, October 17, 2011
In almost every culture in the history of the human race, you find appearances of links to the esoteric worlds. From the Tarot of Ancient Egypt, to high priests, fortune tellers, oracles, the research of astrology, numerology and the list goes on and on down to religious beliefs and different faiths around the globe. At…
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Day Two Hundred Fifty, September 29, 2011
The world seems to be waking up to a new dawn, a new reality, a new arrangement. One quarter of the world population lives in China and speaks Chinese. As the red dragon awakens, it spreads its wings wider and wider to cast its reddish shadow on parts of our world. Whether this is good…
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Day Two Hundred Eleven, August 21, 2011
The first thing that amazes me coming back to Shanghai is the abundance of artificial light. Chinese people love lights, in their toys, on their cars, on their bodies, in their skies, on their buildings, in their windows, on their pens,… everywhere. You cannot escape being almost blinded by lazer light salespeople roaming the streets…
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Day One Hundred Seventy Two, July 13, 2011
We live on the same planet, breathe the same air, drink the same water, are subject to the same natural laws, and still we humans can look and be so completely different. What is it that makes the Chinese a Chinese, the African an African, the German a German, the Indian and Indian… Why do…
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Day One Hundred Fifty Eight, June 29, 2011
Did you ever entertain the thought of taking out a lounge chair, carrying it out to the pavement of a busy street of an densely populated city, opening it up and stretching there to chill? Chinese people baffle me with their ability to just let it all hang for a half hour when they need…
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Day One Hundred Forty Three, June 14, 2011
Lea arrived to Shanghai in 2006 when she was just 2 years old. Since then China has been a new home to her. I often think about the influence that this move will have later on her life as an adult, growing up multilingual, mixing with different cultures, being a foreigner away from home;…
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Day Eighty Nine, April 21, 2011
There is a special bond between a child and his grandparent that is most often glued by a strong tenderness, a powerful love and a kind of friendship that is only possible between these alternate generations. It is as though they are closer to each other being at each end of the circle of life,…
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Day Thirty One, February 22, 2011
Today Lea and I were buying flowers for her (she still believes if she has flowers in her room all the time, a fairy is bound to come sleep in one of them), when we met this little Chinese boy. Ever since we moved to China five years ago I have enjoyed watching the interactions…
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Day Twenty, February 11, 2011
English, German, Chinese valentines cards delivered to us from our daughter and received by us in Arabic… this is life as an expat in a city like Shanghai! We realized that as a mixed nationality family , we sound like the tower of Babel at our dinner table: I speak with my daughter only English,…