thank you! i mean it, i wanted to say “welcome, and thanks for coming around!” even if this is your first or last visit to this site.
i declare today “meiadeleite.com visitors’ appreciation day”!
(edit: yes, feed readers are included as well. :) )
Author: ana
about me
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the olympics are coming to beijing.
we hear that sentence everyday.
you turn on the tv, and *pouf!* the new stadium is completed, the torch is now somewhere being carried by somebody else, the theme song is released. the logo itself is omnipresent in every advertisement, on every metro station, on the most unexpected places, including milk cartons and name cards.
(if you’re portuguese, you probably remember we went through the same thing when we had the expo98, or when we hosted the euro2004. )
and that would be ok, if things weren’t touching the surreal. examples:
* thousands of babies have been named “olympics”
* migrant workers being persuaded to return home during the games
* the the tickets fiasco
* breaking the spitting habit
* Smog and Mirrors: China’s Plan for a Green Olympics, on Wired
just to link a few headlines catching my attention. for me, the cherry on top of the cake is this movie from cctv (removed the video player because it seemed to be crashing in IE, weird).
and what is that, you might ask? it’s a sketch teaching “olympics etiquette” to chinese people, being regularly broadcasted in the state television. a sort of “how you should behave next year when all the foreigners flood the streets of our country”.
it seems quite inoffensive, but to us it’s very amusing because none of what is being taught there actually happens.
for instance, i’d still be at the crossroads if i were to wait for cars to stop to let me pass – even when the light is green for pedestrians! (try this video for the real picture of what happens at a crossroad in china).
and the other day i felt off my bike just at the entrance of my home complex – stuff in my bag all spread on the floor around me (luckily i got away without a scratch). do you think any of the guards standing 5 meters away came to help? right… i guess they haven’t seen the ad yet!
seriously, i believe people coming to china are in for a big eye-opening surprise… which is good.
ps – by the way, someone came up with a cartoon to explain the way the olympics logo was created :D
ps2 – i can’t wait for the 2010 world expo craziness here in shanghai! “better city, better life” being the theme. *insert pollution-induced-cough here*. how appropriate :)
(rant prompted by joão ‘s post on the 2008 olympic games’ other side).
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(searching the cure for the blog blues)
“Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it and the imagination to improvise.” – Sylvia Plath
a big portion of the weekend is spent answering emails that have been piling up through the week. from trivial questions, location changes requests, “i think this user is acting fishy”, people whose “english is not very famous” (that quote actually made us laugh almost to tears!), their email is not working, how much is a stamp to madagascar…
we try to make the effort to answer even the silliest email (quicktext and the quickmove extensions for thunderbird give us a precious hand, common sense is also an underestimated tool).
complaints and requests, most of the time. mais hélas, once in a while, a little kid (or a full class), a grandma or a family somewhere writes to say how sending postcards makes them happy or is keeping them in touch with the world.
and all is right and meaningful again. it feels really good to be part of a project that doesn’t specifically target “people our age”, but instead stretches to reach people everywhere, young and old, more or less internet savvy, with interests as vast as bunny-hopping (as in training bunnies to jump around – i kid you not!) or carol singing.
the only common thing between them is the love of something offline: postcards on their mailbox, when they get home. :)
(on the picture, what i do when i have too much to do: as levi would say, “pantominate”. take pictures, arrange flowers, catalogue coffee marks. what do you do?)
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a thousand islands
we went to qiandao (literally, thousand islands) lake last weekend. it’s a man-made lake near hangzhou, that resulted from the construction of a hydroelectric station: when the water rose, +1000 “islands” were born, hence the name.
the landscape is impressive, if sad.
while the ferry hops between the different islands (curiously themed and mildly touristically explored), one has the feeling of floating between mountain tops, cirurgically cut with level lines.
(more photos, on flickr.)