I’m here to talk about something I know very little about: The Great Ten.
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The Sensational Character Finds of 2006 (20060528)
Should We Divorce from Sisterhood? (20060527)
For those not in the know, my hometown of San Francisco is a “sister city” with Shanghai. I learned this exciting bit of trivia back when I was in primary school, maybe second grade. Back then, I had no idea what being a sister city meant. I still don’t. But judging from how Shanghai is growing and changing, it can’t have much to do with what the place is actually like.
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Clotheshorse (20060522)
I care very little about fine clothes. This may shock some of you. I like my clothes to be clean, and comfortable, and if it’s not jeans and a T-shirt, I generally won’t touch it.
Besides, I can just barely tell the difference between plastic wrap and cotton.
But there’s a scene in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon where one of the characters goes to Shanghai to buy suits for his employees. He flies in with their body measurements, and flies out with some handsomely cut finery, for far less than it would cost probably anywhere in the world.
I just lived that.
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How Soon is New? (20060519-21)
A friend of mine who´d lived in China for a while told me that the country is changing so fast, you have to measure time in dog years. Nowhere has that been more apparent on this trip than in Shanghai.
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A Tale of One Bad Week (20060514-22)
Travelling for months at a time can be fun, but when a series of small, random events combine to form a gestalt pain-in-the-ass, it´s hard not to just change the plane tickets and go home.
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The Great Firewall of China (20060517)
This website has been officially censored. Thank you, Chairman Mao.
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Dammed Yangzi (20060514-16)
Once you step foot in modern China, it’s easy to understand how the Chinese could conceive of a plan to dam up the third-longest river in the world and sacrifice one of their country’s best-known natural treasures all in one swell foop.
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