Ha ha! I laughed bitterly yesterday when I had to go to FUSION to buy some toilet paper or whatever. I remember when the melody in the story above irritated me. And not only me, I hasten to add, but also the staff! Imagine being stuck in a room for 12 hours a day and listening to ONE melody.
But now it’s worse than ever and I wish that one melody would come back, because it was actually quite funky. Now – it’s Christmas! Which, as we all know, starts November 1st! and in Fusion they’re playing the ONE Christmas tune they have. I think it’s Tidings of Comfort and Joy. How can they do it to the staff and to the customers? You’d think they’d be interested in customers spending more time in the shop, not legging it out as soon as they hear the plong-plong and ding-dong? Not everyone has the ability to shut out sounds. This is Chinese water torture at its worst.
聖誕節 (Seng dan jit – Christmas)
百佳 (Baak gai – Park’n’Shop)
音樂 (Yam uk – music)
I love English but sometimes its over-reliance on certain words to describe wildly different things irks me. Take the word have. While it’s nowhere near the top word, as in the word with the most →
Dedicated to Alan, Frank and Jo Here is an article from a time of deep depression but also joy and light. It’s long but, I hope, edifying. You’ll find words – English words this time →
My daylight hours are starting to fill up with Cant-studs (Cantonese students) coming to my house, and of course I have to offer them something for struggling up all those stairs and paying me. As →
Finally, after almost a year of writing and researching (the research consisted mostly of doing the dishes) I have finished my new book CHILLies! Sichuan Food Made Easy. It looked so alluring with the iBook →
While writing about 墨西哥 (Mak Sai Go – Mexico) the other day, I started thinking about other countries I absolutely must go to. The first one on my list is, naturally, North Korea 北韓 (Bak →
People in Hong Kong have short memories. Last week it rained a bit. I think it started Monday. By Tuesday it was all “oh, I’m so SICK of this RAIN! Will it EVER stop?” Interestingly, →
酒！ Jau! Wine! As they call it. It’s actually a deadly spirit so vile that it should only be used for paint stripping and permanently disfiguring your enemies. Strangely, the (mainland) Chinese drink it with →
The New China Bookshop in Guangzhou, or actually, the New China Bookshop in general, is a real treasure trove. Look what I found there last weekend, a map of Mexico with all the towns and →
Are spiders actually really stupid? I mean they can spin these beautiful webs, masterpieces of engineering and all that, but are they a bit dim all the same? This morning I had the first proper →
嗰個人係四川人 (go go yan hai Sei Chyun yan – that piece person is Four River person, that person is from Sichuan) 嗰個人 (go go yan – that piece person). That should be pretty plain sailing →
It's a while ago now but I suddenly remembered I spent a month in the USA this summer, doing the Canto thing of course:
While having lunch (or was it cocktails? Yes! Cocktails!) with my friend Jo in Tibet northern Yunnan the other day, I suddenly realised that few people in the world has less job satisfaction than me. →
No… that can’t be three years ago? But the calendar says it is. It’s just that it feels like a few weeks since we stood outside the railway station in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province, →
The new year celebrations were hard for everyone this year, even man-sized teddies. This sad corpse was lying outside my hotel in Kunming, I’m guessing thrown angrily away by some girl who had expected diamonds →
If there’s one thing I missed during this Christmas and New Year’s Yunnan Extravaganza, it was the chance to do some serious Opulent Chair (or Sofa)- Sitting. How strange; Guangdong province is replete with ultra-opulent →
It’s well and truly next year! First I thought, I can’t wait for 2015 to be over, but then I stopped myself. The faster next year comes, the sooner I’ll be in the grave. So →
Jesus hovering over the Great Wall? Why not. Jesus is everywhere so why not the Great Wall? It just looked so incongruous to see the cross in the middle of Dali’s old city as we →
Last week my glorious sister Beate came to spend Christmas in Hong Kong which she did and how. But no trip to Hong Kong is complete without a trip to Shenzhen. Is it? No, it →
Today I wanted to write a well-researched rant about Cantonese NOT being a dialect, a kind of sub-division, an inferior sub-division, of Mandarin. But I have to cook for 13 in a couple of hours, →
Last night I shared a taxi from Tung Chung – oh how it pains me to spell it that way when it’s pronounced DUNG Chung – with a boy and his domestic helper. I noticed →
Yesterday I wrote about a guide to recognise white-to-coloured racism or “microaggression,[] the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional(my italics), that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to →
