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A basic lack of Internet has keep me from posting the past week or so. I went to an internet cafe the other night but the space bar on the keyboard didn’t work, allowing me only to be able to moderate comments. But overall Sanya is a beautiful place, minus the scorching heat at this time of year and the high ticket prices. Some initial questions that I have come to mind while here and that I don’t have the proper time to research.

1. Why are there so many Russians here? Most of the signs are in Chinese and Russian, and we have been mistaken for Russians multiple times.

2. Why are Hainan cab companies so corrupt? I even saw an ad on television about it. Why is the problem so bad here?

Next it is off to Guangzhou, and then making my way further North.

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Traveling around for a couple of weeks, so posting with be intermittent or nonexistent. Enjoy this kitten!

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I saw this story on CCTV news tonight (I am using it as listening practice, with mostly no positive gain) about Bananas from Hainan being infected with a SARS like virus and searched online to find out more information:

China dismissed a rumour on Thursday that bananas grown on a southern island might contain viruses similar to SARS, the latest and most improbable in a series of food-safety scares to hit the country.

“It is purely a rumour and it is impossible for bananas to contain SARS-like viruses,” the Agriculture Ministry said, referring to text messages some cell phone users had received.

“The spreaders of the false information either have inadequate relevant scientific knowledge or have ulterior motives,” it said, adding police had been asked to investigate.

Since I will be in Hainan next week I wanted to make sure that there was not some kind of crazy viral outbreak going on. Now I know that I should just keep a wary distance away from bananas. Also, this is not the first time this year that Hainan bananas have been in the news.

Hainan bananas were subject to rumours they caused cancer earlier this year when the island’s plantations suffered a fungus blight called yellow wilt or, coincidentally, Panama disease.

All of this can not be good for the banana industry

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While cleaning a pot yesterday I heard a dripping sound under my kitchen sink. I opened up the cupboard and saw that the bottom of the drain had cracked and was spilling water directly under the floor. I let it dry out for a while and tried to seal it up with the only adhesive product that I currently have, clear packing tape. This obviously didn’t work, and so I put a small pot under it and called it a day.

Sorry for the poor quality of this picture but it is dark under the sink. Notice the blue tubbing that is coming out of the plastic sink drain. My bathroom sink is assembled in the same cheap, cheap manner. I would like to point that brown thing on the left. I assume that is the line to the sewer. It is covered grease and other strange things.

Still, no reappearance of Ratty, although i did see a dead rat outside the supermarket. It’s the plague!

Update:
I started writing this post before I went to diner, and then got busy packing and hit publish without reading through it. I swear that originally there was a point to this post.

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Plans to require Chinese bloggers to register their real names has been put on hold, although apparently people are still encouraged to do so.

On Tuesday, state media quoted Huang Dengqing, general secretary of the Internet Society of China, as citing difficulties in setting up systems to verify identities and to ensure blog hosts maintained data privacy.

“The conditions for implementing a back-stage real-name system are not yet mature,” said Mr Huang. “For the moment, there will be no compulsory . . . system, but use of such a system will be encouraged.”

It seems that this “encouraged” system is really in the best interest of the blog providing services, as it protects them if any questionable content is produced using their system. But I would bet this isn’t the last we here about this real-name system.

And I urge everyone to go read the piece over at Sinocidal on How to write a China article, which is both funny and totally right about most things you read in the news about China.

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Before coming to China and we would tell other Chinese people that we were coming to Nanjing, and there are a couple of responses that we would almost certainly get. One was that “Do you know about the Nanjing Massacre?” Yes, we do. And “Do you know that Nanjing is one off the four furnaces of China?” (The other three being Wuhan, Nanchang and Chongqing) I kind of ignored this warning before we came, since a quick look at the map shows that Nanjing is not really that far south. I remember getting a globe and spinning it around, keeping my finger at the same latitude, and Nanjing was somewhere around the Tallahassee, Florida level. This discovery made me worry a little more, but still thought that it was a bit of an exaggeration.

Before coming to China i spent time visiting my family in Upstate New York. That area during September is one of my favorite places, as Summer is cooling down and a bit of chill starts to get into the air. Then when we got here in September of last year, all I remember doing is sweating. And this was in late September, not even in the full throws of Summer heat. I think at this time of year we are starting to reach the same temperature of when we arrived in China. For the past three days it has been around 90 degrees and humid.

As mentioned before, I am from the Northeast of the United States, and am not used to this kind of heat. I own a fur hat for god sakes! Yesterday is was in the library helping Jenn to survey people and I swear it was about 10 degrees hotter in there then outside. Occasionally I would sneak into the air conditioned stacks, browse and try to cool down (NNU has a copy of Lee Iacocca’s autobiography for some reason).

Anyway, I will not try not to mention the heat again, as I don’t want to be one of “those guys” who endlessly complain about the weather. But a quick look on the bright side, today my favorite half-pekingese neighborhood dog, Huangguang, had his fur shaved down to help him cool down in the heat. He looks like a furry brown snowman. Hilarious.

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Via Free Government Information, a video made by Eric Faden, Professor of English and Film Studies of Bucknell University, explains copyright using Disney characters. Very well done.

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I personally am in favor of anyone exploring the moon. It arouses the inner science fiction dork in me that wishes that there were people living on the moon and mars, flying cars and transporters. So despite the critics who see this as just another way that China is trying to solidify military power, I am extremly interested in China’s plans on going to the moon. It was just released that they plan on sending a lunar probe into orbit around the moon in the second half of 2007. This is part of a three part plan for lunar exploration, according to Ouyang Ziyuan, a leading researcher:

Ouyang, who himself is a CAS academician, said that the first step is designing a multifunctional orbiter, which was named after a fabled fairy Chang’e who flied to the moon.

The orbiter, Chang’e I, will get precise three-dimentional pictures of the moon, detect the 14 elements, including helium-3, in a remote way, and take back environmental, geological and topographic features of the moon, Ouyang said.

The key of the second phase is to develop a moon-lander, which might get much more detailed information on the moon, he said.

In the third phase, he said, scientists hope a unmanned vessel return with samples from the moon.

Mostly this seems like another way for China to prove itself to the world, although Sun Laiyan, chief of the China National Space Administration, brings up some other reasons why it might be in the best interest of the country.

“However, the returns (of space activities) are huge, in terms of politics, economy, military and convenience brought to everyday life,” he said. “For one dollar invested in space science, you can expect direct and indirect returns of at least seven dollars.”

Where the hell does that statistics come from?

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I have come to the realization that I don’t really like your standard garden-variety fish. And I love other types of seafood such as salmon, tuna, lobster, crabs and shrimp. But if the choice is between a pork chop and a hunk of fish, pork chop always wins. The flavor usually isn’t it any thing special and my paranoia tells me that there are small bones that can get stuck in my throat and kill me. The majority of fish that I have had while in China is some kind of white fish, and the way it is prepared not usually that tasty. The two main ways it is served is either the whole fish is brought out or it is sliced and placed into a large pot, both of which are edible but nothing I would go out of my way to eat. This however was something that needed to be tried:

Quick back story; I found this in Walmart, and it was in the same aisle as the dried meats and fish snacks. This leads me to assume that this is a stand alone snack, not just a cooking ingredient as one might think on first inspection. Although why you would want to eat something that is almost entirely bone is beyond me, the back of the package advertised “authentic fish spine flavor”. For the 2 RMB I knew that this had to be purchased. It took me a few days to work up the courage to try this snack, as I was intimidated by the strange resemblance they had to centipedes and mostly confused as to how eat it. I decided in the end that you must just suck on it like a lozenge, and eventually the meat falls off. A reaction shot:

This lasted about 10 seconds. The fish taste was over-powering, like I opened a jar of fish food and dumped it in my mouth. I spit it out and then had to chew gum to try and get rid of the taste, which seemed to stay with me the rest of the day. And just my opening the package stunk up the apartment so bad I had to light some intense to get rid of the smell. Factoring in taste, flavor and appearance of the fish spines, this is now official the worst thing I have eaten in China.

For a better look at the packaging see Jenn’s well titled picture The Horribly Smelly Fish Spine Debacle.

Related RedKemp:
Chinese Snacks

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