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Good to see Guangzhou has its priorities straight

Posted Wednesday, August 20, 2008 6:53 AM by will
From the "you couldn't make it up" department here in Imagethief Towers, an old-school China Daily gem: City gets tough on foreign jaywalkers By Zhan Lisheng (China Daily) The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou is taking stern action against foreigners Read More...
12 Comments

E-Z steps to make your own Beijing air at home

Posted Wednesday, July 30, 2008 1:12 AM by will
Imagethief realizes that he and much of the journalistic and blogging community have been doing a grave disservice to our readers who don't live in Beijing. We beg your forgiveness. Living in Beijing is such an all-consuming experience that we sometimes Read More...
10 Comments

You are liable for any misuse of the contents of the advice

Posted Thursday, May 15, 2008 12:51 AM by will
I've been looking at this message for the past four years: "You are liable for any misuse of the contents of the advice". Some of you may recognize this as the warning that all Chinese ATMs give you if you have the temerity to ask for a printed transaction Read More...
17 Comments
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2007 best-of-Imagethief and statistics

Posted Tuesday, February 05, 2008 11:01 PM by will
There is no such thing as a dull year in China. 2008 is well underway and already looks like another whopper. We're only a month in and we've already had the biggest storms in half a century. The Olympics, the mother of all China events, is now a scant seven months off. God only knows what will happen in between. Read More...
4 Comments

Ich Bin Ein Beijinger: Beijing reloaded

Posted Sunday, January 27, 2008 9:26 PM by will
I pinch-hit for Kaiser on the back page of That's Beijing's January issue. Thanks to my stint in Shanghai it's the first time in nearly a year that I've written something for them. Fittingly, I wrote about moving back to Beijing from Shanghai. The column Read More...
1 Comments
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Secret Santa's revenge

Posted Monday, December 17, 2007 12:06 AM by will
A few days ago Imagethief, in maximum Grinch mode, wrote a long rant on the miserable office ritual of " secret santa " gift programs. In that post I agonized about how awful I am at buying cheap presents for people I don't know. It seems I'm not the Read More...
10 Comments
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I hate secret Santa

Posted Tuesday, December 11, 2007 3:09 AM by will
Imagethief likes the holiday season. He is not one of those December curmudgeons who bah-humbugs his way through Christmas. Give me trees, tinsel, candy canes and a big dinner with my friends. My dad used to roast a goose for Christmas. How traditional Read More...
14 Comments
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Hairy crabs, the hill of pain and the boulevard of a thousand massage touts

Posted Wednesday, November 21, 2007 6:14 AM by will
Imagethief went for a hike with some good friends on Sunday. Hiking is one of the things that I was sorry to give up when I moved to Shanghai, and that I've been most eager to rediscover upon my return. In Shanghai you can drive for days through the industrial Read More...
23 Comments

Further adventures in glamorous international travel

Posted Monday, November 12, 2007 10:17 AM by will
Having arrived in Macau, the romance continues. First was immigration, where the lines crawled as officers stamped arriving passengers in with the indifferent sloth that seemed circa Vietnam, 1996. My immigration officer painstakingly inspected every Read More...
7 Comments

Reconsidering a glamorous life of international travel

Posted Monday, November 12, 2007 8:25 AM by will
In the cold and revealing light of hindsight it seems that aspiring to a life of international travel and adventure was, perhaps, not the wisest possible choice. This revelation dawned upon Imagethief this afternoon as he patrolled Beijing’s Capital International Read More...
2 Comments

Just what Beijing needs: A giant Ferris wheel

Posted Tuesday, November 06, 2007 6:46 AM by will
Proving that there is no idea so unoriginal that it can't be rejuvenated by making it bigger, Beijing has announced plans for a colossal Ferris wheel . This, it is claimed, will be larger than both the famous London Eye (destroyed by the Fantastic Four Read More...
11 Comments
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Deconstructing the White Rabbit wrapper

Posted Wednesday, October 17, 2007 7:36 AM by will
Imagethief has rather a sweet tooth. Hence my long acquaintance with the gym and the pleasures of the long run. One of China's under-appreciated pleasures is the enamel-stripping joy of a chewy White Rabbit Milk Candy. I'm not the first to be smitten, Read More...
17 Comments

Why aren't you drinking the Wang Lao Ji?

Posted Thursday, September 06, 2007 10:25 PM by will
Imagethief spent a busy two days helping some representatives of a European country manage a last minute press conference. This was a sudden request that had resulted in 36 hours of breakneck work involving much frantic communication, central European Read More...
15 Comments
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Because you haven't suffered enough: In-flight mobile phone service

Posted Monday, September 03, 2007 10:08 PM by will
As a regular user of China's domestic airlines, Imagethief has learned the hard way that Chinese air travel is simply the bus travel of the twenty-first century. It's been a painful process for someone who still recalls flying Pan-Am from San Francisco Read More...
7 Comments

The dark side of AmCham membership

Posted Sunday, July 22, 2007 3:15 AM by will
Imagethief has been in Shanghai about six months now. Since arriving I've received my share of Chinese SMS spam and telephone pitches. But until recently I had been blessedly free of calls from expatriate money managers. In the last two weeks that has Read More...
3 Comments
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