User Comments - cmkchina

Posted on: Standing Up for Car Seats

What do parents with small children do when visiting China?  Do they normally bring a car seat with them or is it possible to hire driver with car with car seat?  Do many taxis have rear seat belts to fix the seat with - my experience was many cabs took out the rear belts or hid them under seat covers.  

Of course the more modern car seats use Isofix to attach.  Is this common in Chinese cars?

I'd be interested in any parents' experiences.

Posted on: A Private Money Changer

I'm intrigued by this term "scalper".  What does it mean?  Is this the same as conman?  or more like a tout?  or can it be both?

Posted on: Noisy Eater

Not only the noisy eating, and not closing one's mouth when eating, but also the way most meals have lots of dishes and everyone just uses their chopsticks, which have been in their mouth, to pick up the food from the dishes - serving utensils seem very rare.  This doesn't seem to make sense with the comments about use of toothpicks etc, but then these cultural norms often don't.

Posted on: Using Excel

MS suite of lessons? Missed those. Do you have the lesson titles/codes please?

Posted on: I'm gonna be Late

interestingly on the BBC News last night, they broadcast an interview with a senior Australian politician (it might even have been the premier) talking about the press after the News International affair and lambasting them for printing "cr*p" - a word a good step up from "pissed". I did find this a little dissonant although not really offensive, but it shows the regional differences in acceptability of words.

Posted on: Ice Cream Run

Was a bit surprised to buy a choc-ice lolly in China and find it had what seemed like frozen bean curd inside the icecream.  Stuck to Magnums after that!

Popsicle would get a blank look in the UK where we'd use ice lolly - is that used in the US as well?

Posted on: A Wasteful Husband

would you normally use "faucet" in American?  We'd call it a tap in English.

Posted on: Sleeping in

great lesson.  would be super to have the key vocabulary saveable as with normal lessons

Posted on: Baijiu or Beer

Most Chinese beer is pretty average lager, but the Tsingtao brewery in Qingdao does a dark beer, that is very good, but quite tricky to find.  It seems to be readily available in bottles in Hong Kong, and is available on draft around the brewery.  The most basic form of take-out: a guy seen walking down the street with a transparent plastic bag filled with beer (no bottles or anything, just the bag).  The brewery was built by the Germans when this area was under German control and so the dark beer has its routes in the German dunkel style.