Your Mom Stops Traffic in Xian
From ChinaSmack:
Yesterday afternoon around 3 o’clock, while this journalist drove towards the North Street and Xihuamen intersection, suddenly appeared ahead a middle-aged woman around 40-years-old walking amongst traffic, “collecting toll” from all of the cars passing through this street, skillfully knocking on the driver’s side windows of every car, then demanding fees from the driver, and the drivers all helplessly and more or less paying the toll.
Perhaps it was because yesterday’s temperature was too high (note: at the time, this journalist’s in-car thermometer showed 45 degrees Celsius), this female toll collector had a towel on her head and her upper body indeed was only wearing a white bra.
Artsy Photographs From Xingcheng
I took a short trip this weekend and visited a small Chinese city called Xingcheng. It has only about 100,000 people — which is tiny compared to Beijing’s 13 million.
The feel of the city was very third-world so I decided to shoot some photos and make them black and white for your artsy-fartsy enjoyment. Remember, click on the image for a bigger version.
This guy was selling turtles on the street. I have no idea who would buy a turtle as a pet from this guy. Unless he’s selling them to be eaten, which makes me feel bad for the little guys. I wish they could find some ooze and become the heroes they were destined to be.
This was just a cute moment of a mother and daughter riding through the old area of town. The picture didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped.
This was my second favorite photo. These three guys were on break from doing some kind of work, just chilling out and smoking cigs against one of the old city walls.
This was my favorite. This old lady was so old lady it was too much for words. So I took a picture. And now it’s art. Whee!
China Puts The “Jew” In Juice
Since I’ve been making you wait so long for a new post, I thought this little nubbin’ might hold you over.
Enjoy. Feel free to caption in the comments.
(Also, I swear to god we will award a prize for the Ass Hair Salon Caption Contest at some point in my life.)
Dogs of Chende
A couple of weeks ago I visited Chende. It was nice. It had an emperor’s summer palace and a cool little foreign teacher community that we hung out with one night. But it also had a dog market.
The dog market wasn’t really a “market,” it was just a bunch of tables and cages set up around a big parking lot. I snapped some photos of the dogs and you can see them below.
Now, I fully recognize that being sold as pets is probably the best fate a dog can have. These dogs weren’t being bred for food, or fighting, or to be vicious attack dogs. They were being sold to tourists — Chinese and foreign — visiting Chende. And I also realize that there are children in China living in worse conditions than these dogs.
But, despite all that, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. Check out the pictures below and let me know what you think.
The Great Wall
A handsome gentleman with a mysterious past posted a wonderful article on his personal website. (And he uses way less adjectives than me.)
You can check it out here.
Note: If you have a slow connection, give the site a minute to load. It uses some hella big images.
