User Comments - zhenlijiang

Posted on: Tomb Sweeping Festival -- 清明

baabaabardwan--吟游诗人，多产译者。

Posted on: Hungry Traveler: Halal

synesthasia88,  "to sell" is 卖 and actually 4th tone as in the vocab section.

Posted on: Toilet Types

if you could choose one and only one, which ability is more valuable:  being able to go whenever/wherever you need to, or being able to eat anything at all served you considered edible by people in other cultures?

Posted on: Toilet Types

katietang,  if there's a receptacle for the used paper then you're expected to put it there, not flush, (same as in Korea, even in plush places).  travel guides in Japan tell us that or we wouldn't have known either, we met no one in SH who told us not to flush paper.  i disposed in those receptacles in public, but back at the apartment i was staying at i admit i flushed even though a bucket w/lid lined with plastic sheets was provided.  took care though, to use paper much more sparingly than i would normally think about at home.  for good reason. the toilet in my friend's room next door kept clogging and overflowing. much to her mortification she had to have our landlady send a guy over to fix it after #2. hardly knowing any Chinese to apologize or explain (but what's to explain really, right?), the 30 minutes alone with the guy cleaning up after her was a very long half-hour.

i found it surprising how the pile of used paper doesn't smell like you might think it would.

Posted on: Dog Meat and Animal Rights

bababardwan,

a very wide variety of belief systems,cultures etc

totally agree, that is the reality. even as a certain value system, or "English-speaking westerner culture" even, may often appear to prevail (in the sense of number of opinions vocalized. obviously can't say what the "actual majority" feels in any discussion) in the community here as English is the lingua franca, that is still only a partial view.  i think that here we still find ourselves in a relatively comfortable zone, not around that much diversity and so it's always good to know that there are still so many other attitudes and cultural backgrounds in the world and in our own countries that may often be irreconcilable with our mindset. also agree, it's no easy feat for CPod to take them all in and that they can't be expected to avoid being offensive to every last user, let alone all of the time. 

Posted on: Toilet Types

on second thought chanelle is absolutely right, high heels are not good because in them you can't really control where your weight goes. and boots are even worse because your ankles are not free to flex.

Posted on: Toilet Types

i've been in scary toilets in Paris (violent flushing from all unforeseen directions flooding the floor, not just the hole in it, then the lights go out on you), in the US and in Japan.

obviously the squatting is not a big deal for us. anybody born pre-1975 in Japan has grown up with squat toilets, not necessarily at home but most everywhere else. and yes westerners who came over used to bitch incessantly about our 和式便所; i assumed they were considered degrading in some way.

while it is always good to have inner muscle strength (for any purpose), the trick to being relatively comfortable over a squat type is not strength so much as balance. if you just place all your weight on the balls of the feet and keep your head where it should be you'll be fine. in that sense i think high heels are good. but right, definitely not suede! no matter how careful, you will be spattering on yourself.

another good thing is to maintain limberness in calves and flexibility in ankles. most grown-ups don't do this enough anyway, but stretching (actually the whole backside of the legs up to the buttocks) regularly can be life-altering.

like matt and bodawei have said, from the public sanitation viewpoint the squatters are superior.

Posted on: Which Finger?

hey raymond, see changye's comment above--quite interesting.

philren, as far as i understand the toes are simply referred to as 拇趾，二趾，中趾，四趾 and 小趾. if there are any other names for them perhaps someone could enlighten us.

Posted on: Which Finger?

too bad he only grew one new right hand (well two, counting its index finger-tip) though. so i guess the left hand is a dominant trait. when they get the gene therapy fine-tuned they'll straighten that out won't they.

Posted on: Tomb Sweeping Festival -- 清明

hi pete, i didn't say it was going to be any good though! ambitious is an understatement. i'm still clueless enough to be fearless in that way.