Hua Guofang

lol. And that Jurne is seriously reefuckingdonkulous. How much funk can be crammed in to a single word?!

Fresh. Dope. Illin. Fire.

Got boring.

Shit, is Courtney Love even still alive? I just assumed she was dead.

I love the letters in ACHE and sometimes wish I'd taken that rather than MAO49 or FASHN. I never even thought of letter structure and flow when I grabbed those words. But MEK is right, it's what you make of it.

@ Mercer - judging a country as large and diverse as China on one or two cities is like judging the US on Detroit and small town East Texas. I'm no great fan of Beijing and Hubei either but Shanghai, Hong Kong and Qingdao are pretty awesome places. Chengdu, Hangzhou, Dali and some other joints are supposed to be awesome, you rarely hear a bad word about them. I've never been to those joints though. Filipino man-sluts on tour -

Graffitious and rando shite These are unborn chicks cooked in their eggs. I ate a bunch of shit including insects and whatnot but I did not eat this. There are limits. this, on the other hand is delish - Shanghai sweets and pastries Was pokey but I miss this little pad This door don't snitch....

Music festival and nightlife -

Was taken out to the "Gunpowder Underground" one day by a local shopkeeper I used to chat with. It's the black market for fireworks that springs up in Hebei every year around Spring Festival (lunar new year). This is where fireworks that are banned or only supposed to be sold to licensed operators (shit the size of soccer balls you put in home-made mortar tubes, I shit you not). the larger room was pretty scary. It was in a basement that was full of people with one little doorway in and out. A dude went to light a cigarette in there (as I said, no sense of self-preservation), the staff went ape-shit and I went out the fucking door. Randomness

Looking forward to hearing how all that panned out! ^^^ In the mean time, Beijing, over a number of years and most recently, about 2 weeks back. View from my old apartment: Clear day - Not so clear - and yes, this is pollution, don't let anyone tell you that it's fog Off the fucking scale day - again, this is NOT fog, it's pollution largely from the coal fire power stations in Hebei around Beijing. Other factors such as industry, cars, construction, desertification, etc. all play a role but the two biggest factors are coal and industry -

Odd ball cans are awesome, I never just buy one brand straight.

Might be a shit ride, easy line to bomb though. cool thread, can't stop hearing The Kennedys in my head now.

Oh jesus, lol.

Rice paper roles for the fucking win.

yeah, Guangzhou, that's what I was thinking, Guangdong province. They speak a different lingo altogether than the rest of China, some argue that the Cantonese have more more in common with Southeast Asian's than they do with Han China. Their customs down there will be quite different than that throughout most of China. And right, yeah, that's what I meant, the people getting married (the kids) offer tea to the parents in a reverent and solemn fashion. That's been part of the deal in all the weddings I've been to, including my own. Let me be clear though, the wedding I'm posting now is not mine, I didn't go through all that. I put a shoe on at the entrance to the house, we drove up the street to the reception room, ate food and went home. I wasn't up for all the hullabaloo either. Plus, you have to have all your family and friends there to do all that shit and I didn't inflict being in that remote and dirty place on anyone else other than my parents. We just took out a bar for the night in Beijing and partied with friends instead.

This wedding was in Hubei and I've been to similar weddings in Beijing. There are definitely some local customs mixed in, such as the piss bucket and going to the new house before the reception (I think the fighting aunties may have been more of a local 'standard' rather than custom). But the shoe thing and busting down the door is more widespread. The tea ceremony you mentioned was the kids giving the parents a cup of tea and all that shit, right? Don't want to pry but which part of China is your wive's family from? Mine is obviously Hubei. *Yeah, red envelopes for fucking everything over there.

An astonishing amount and not just spot fires either. Read this: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-02/10/content_7461514.htm Watch these: -

Forgot the most important one: sha-bi (sha-bee) - retarded cunt, probably the most common term of abuse in China. I've seen old ladies calling their husbands a shabi on the street, gotta love it.

If you get called a guizi (gway-dza), maozi (mao-dza) or laowai (lao-why), then you are being abused. Guizi is ghost, maozi basically means 'hairy and unevolved' and laowai is one that I don't fully understand but is not particularly polite. The Chinese here treat each other worse than they treat other races. It's funny how such a nationalistic peoples can be so cruel to their own.

lol, friend of mine was seeing a fairly well-to-do local lady who said she didn't like the French Quarter in Shanghai because there was usually one foreigner to every Chinese person. Clearly this woman was not well traveled about the globe. * in all the years I lived in China I experienced very little racism aimed at Westerners. I experienced racism towards black and Turkic people and favouritism towards locals but very little racism towards myself and Westerners. Whilst there is some resentment for the years of colonialism under the Europeans/Americans, the Chinese have a lot of respect for the West and its modern achievements. Dare I say it, a touch of jealousy towards the West may also sometimes surface from time to time.

Bit more grime, then off to Beijing. The lucky in life... And those that draw a short straw....

The next day people gather at the respective family's houses. The chosen few on the groom's side get in a bunch of expensive and flashy cars and drive to the bride's house. The ritual here is pretty interesting..., it involves money, candy and violence. The groom's mission is to get the bride out of her parent's house. To do this he must find the bride's shoe somewhere in the house, then find the bride, place the shoe on her foot and then carry her to the waiting cars. To do this he first must get past a barrage of kids who demand red packages for information about where the shoe is in the house. Then he must get past a bunch of women (usually the aunties) who demand red packages to let him pass - and I shit you not, these women fight relatively hard amongst themselves over who gets the packages. It seems to be a bit of family honour on the line as the groom's aunties are also involved. There's a bunch of hard slappin, gang ups, bruised knees and a few torn clothes at the end of this. When the groom locates the room with the shoe in it he has to fight his way through the door, which is always closed and usually barricaded by the bride's friends and families. The groom tries to bribe them by slipping red packages under the door but always ends up pushing though, climbing over or finding another way in. he then takes the shoe to the bride, shods her and then carries her away. The father literally cried when that happened here. The motorcade goes to the couple's new house, the father of the groom must carry the bride from the car to the house with a fake piss bucket on his head and his pants down (I think this might be a local custom as I've not witnessed that at other weddings. The father refused to drop his dacks and the piss bucket only stayed on for a minute or two). Everyone then goes to a hotel reception room, which is set up for a fucking rock star's wedding. They do a cheesy kind of ceremony, which doesn't seem to have any cultural guidance to it and it also seems overbearingly western as well. After this, everyone eats and drinks before very promptly leaving. This part is all over within an hour, it's as if the people say "Right, food and booze is gone, so am I". The amount of money that is spent for that one hour is simply fucking ridiculous. Everyone packs up, goes home and that is that.

The wedding. Runs for two days, basically. Day one - each family provides a feast out the front of their house for family, friends, neighbours, business associates and basically fucking everyone. People turn up with 'red packages', which are little red envelopes filled with cash. The unspoken rule is that this money covers the cost of the feast and your seat at the wedding reception. Every now and then people will turn up with their whole family to eat but only pay a small amount of money. That's considered pretty rude and insulting, for obvious reasons. At the street feast, which you can see below, a professional street kitchen crew set up and do all the catering. The family all pitch in by setting tables with table cloth, bowls, chopsticks, nibbles and drinks. Drinks include soft drinks, a bottle of red wine and a bottle of baijiu (translates to 'white alcohol' but is basically the Chinese version of vodka/whiskey and generally tastes like shit. Each bottle at this wedding was approx RMB88, which would have been about RMB120 if bought by the bottle. RMB120 is about USD$20 by straight conversion and about USD$35-45 by PPP). People sit down and eat, the family goes around and toasts with each table wishing them to "eat well, drink well". The people eat, drink and then leave. People cycle through the tables for a number of hours with crowds of people waiting out on the street for their turn...., in a fashion that seemed terribly awkward to me. And of course there are fireworks......, out in the middle of the road...., and traffic...., who just continue driving on past that shit....., which I've seen explode on other occasions. dudes seriously lack a sense of self-preservation in that country.

That's along the lines of what Ozgraf also told me as well.