China Blog by Chinaorbit.com

Yesterday, the movie about John Rabe started in China. Apparently you can already get illegal copies on the streets. I did not watch the movie yet but chatted about it with a Chinese friend who watched the movie already. He really wondered why John Rabe was not shown as hero, in his opinion, the movie always emphasized the few negative aspects of John Rabe (he was member of the NSDAP for example). The movie is not available in Korea yet. The director is a German, the movie is about a “good” German in the World War II, so I guess the movie will be full of political correctness. Its just a prejudice, I will keep it until I watched the movie myself.

I am curious about the reaction in Japan. I used to live together with a Japanese when I was studying in China 10 years ago. According to him, the massacre in Nanjing happened. But the Japanese army had no choice than shooting civilians because Chinese resistance was disguised as civilians. And Chinese exaggerate the number of the people killed there because Nanjing even did not have 300.000 inhabitants.

Well, after a while I really stopped discussing topics like this with him. But in Japanese history, the Nanjing massacre does not play a big role, its sometimes not even mentioned in schoolbooks. Japanese counted their own dead but somehow forgot to count the dead of the Chinese army and civilians during the war. Before they left they also destroyed lots of evidence.

We’ve upgrade wordpress to latest version. Please leave a comment if you find anything unusual.

It has a new interface for admin panel and I think it’ll take sometime before I get used to it. The upgrate-function of wordpress is great, one click and its done if you dont make any manual changes.

We postponed this for some time, but now I also upgrated the theme of wordpress and its finally possible to handle widgets in the sidebar.

Recently there were some updates on the agenda: typo3 has a new version with a lot of improved features, phpBB3 had to be updated, dolphin and of course wordpress. The wordpress update is finished now and I have to admit that it will take some time to get used to the new backend. But in general it feels looks like a big improvement.

Typo3 is a bit annoying because you often have to update the extensions and sometimes change the extension-templates after updates. Fortunatly we did not too many changes in the source-code.

Chinese New Year – Part II.

Beijing really gone crazy – unbelievable

Beijing welcomes the Year of the Rat! Enjoy this video taken in Beijng.

My friend left last night, well really early this morning, and he had such a huge hassle with the weight of his luggage. Because he’s going back to France, he could only carry back about 40 lbs per bag and he was only allowed one luggage bag. This is crazy. I’m so happy the USA has a limit of 50 lbs per bag and two allowable luggage bags. More than double other places. It’s so hard to not buy things here in China. Everything is so cheap and you want to show everything to your friends and family back at home. If I could bring back an old Chinese man that yelled out “Fapiao” all day I would, that’d be great….I’d also bring back as much meat sticks and bottles of baijiu (horrible Chinese liquor) as possible. Since I have a higher weight limit, when I leave I’m going to see how much I can fit in my bags. I have a feeling some baijiu and maybe even some meat sticks will reach the “land of the free”.

I went to Xian this weekend and really noticed how bad the pollution is here in China. I know Beijing is high but I usually dont smell it or feel it in my lungs however in Xian I did. At one point my felt light headed as if I was breathing in car fumes. Not good. I might need one of those painter masks or a gas mask, geez.

There are a few new changes in the Beijing subway. I’m posting this to let everyone know what the two updates are. Good news is both changes are positive. First is the new subway line 5 which is a north to south line crossing through Yonghegong line 2 and Dongdan line 1 and then Chongwemen on line 2 again. This is great and traveling to other places can now be easier and faster. This line is also suppose to have new lcd screen inside the train cars and mobile phone service which is amazing! Now I can finally talk on the subway ride, although I believe it’s only on this 5 line. I wish this service could be available on all of the lines. Maybe soon? The other change is that subway fares are only 2 yuan now instead of 3. Hey saving 1 yuan per trip will add up. As Buddha said “even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel”. Hopefully this change won’t increase the already congested subway cars.

In my opinion, you can find the best chocolate cake in the world in the “Cafe Bros”. The owner is Korean, you can find the cafe near Wudaokou Subway Station. Just walk about 500 m into west direction towards Beijing University at Chengfu Lu, you find it at the left side (and no, I do not get any money for this post)

北京市海淀区

五道口华清商务会馆底商 E 号 ，

Tel. 82863198

chocolate cake in Chinese: 巧克力蛋糕 “qiaokeli dangao”.