http://eastweststation.com/blog Musings and Bladderment from One Fat Englishman Out East Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:54:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en To kick off, here's a nicely provocative comment from a Chinese lady on the Dalian Xpat forum... most of foreigners in china are rubbish(except those who are assigned to work here),they cant support themselves in their own countries and that is why most of them are english teachers (or other languages),coz ... http://eastweststation.com/blog/2008/09/29/who-exactly-are-we-english-teachers/ Recently there have been some street scuffles in Bangkok between pro and anti-government protestors. The anti-government posse is called Pad and according to the Guardian: The People's Alliance for Democracy (Pad) is a collection of rightwing activists, business people and former army chiefs...The movement wants to replace the country's electoral ... http://eastweststation.com/blog/2008/09/09/rich-mans-club/ Back to school! Back on the old school bus. Twice a week for the last year I have been taking the school bus from Dalian City centre to the outskirts of Lüshun (aka Port Arthur), where the new campus for Dalian University of Foreign Languages is located. It's a 40 kilometre ... http://eastweststation.com/blog/2008/09/05/the-road-to-lushun/ My neighbourhood in downtown Dalian has a new little teashop that has jauntily named itself "Jocund Hut". That's a pretty funky name and I guess the owner got that obscure and odd adjective from an electronic dictionary, and I also wonder how many native speakers - even - know what ... http://eastweststation.com/blog/2008/08/25/jocund-hut/ The Spanish men's basketball team recently provoked a storm in a teapot over an advertising photo showing them pulling the sides of their eyes...because they were off to China! Geddit? Hilarious! And someone recently dredged up another photo from the Spanish women tennis team's website showing some of the same high ... http://eastweststation.com/blog/2008/08/17/slitty-eyes/ When folks ask me where I'm from, I just tell them it's a small cloudy country. But while Britain is certainly cloudy, Chinese still tell me that London is a foggy city, even though it hasn't been so since the sixties. It seems a fair few people's perceptions of other countries ... http://eastweststation.com/blog/2008/07/31/my-cloudy-country/ is a line from a famous and provocative poem by Psychopoet Sylvia Plath. The poem's name is "Daddy" and it equates her daddy, her husband, and male authority figures in general with Nazis and with vampires who suck the life force out of their female victims. Sylvia Plath committed suicide ... http://eastweststation.com/blog/2008/07/23/every-woman-adores-a-fascist/ Good title? I think so and I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which is a popular science work by the travel writer Bill Bryson. As the title suggests, it's a book about life, the universe and everything...from the Big Bang to the ascendancy of Homo sapiens. As the man himself says, ... http://eastweststation.com/blog/2008/07/11/a-short-history-of-nearly-everything/ "I love babies, but I couldn't eat a whole one", said someone once. Some grumpy old man I guess, but I couldn't find out who, even on Godgle. In any case, it used to be my attitude more or less, and until very very recently I found it very ... http://eastweststation.com/blog/2008/07/05/my-kiddy-cooking-weekends/ July and August http://eastweststation.com/blog/2008/07/05/two-good-reasons-to-be-a-university-teacher/