To make up for the continuing lack of a DPRK travelogue, I present this video, filmed at one of Pyongyang’s “Children’s Palaces” on our last full day in Pyongyang:

As suggested in the comments here. I had to make it happen.

I have just spent an incredible week in the DPRK, better known as North Korea. I plan to post a detailed journal of the trip at some point in the future. In the meantime, you are welcome to peruse my Flickr photo set of pictures from the trip. The photo here is of the monument to the Great Fatherland Liberation War, better known as the Korean War.

As of 4:30 pm, Monday, April 2, 2007:

The “500″ is for respirable particulates. The other numbers are concentrations of Sulfur Dioxide and Nitrogen Dioxide, respectively. Taken from the Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center. I’m not sure if this is a computer error or not, but looking out the window at the entirely brown air seems to confirm it. Yuck.

Edit: To be perfectly clear, 500 is as high as the air pollution scale in China goes.

Pancho, our family’s loyal companion of 15 years, faced with a long and painful decline after a long and happy life, was put to sleep today. He’s been such a big part of our family for such a long time, it hasn’t really sunk in yet. However, I think it’s the little things that I’m going to miss most: when I lived at home, he used to sleep on the rug beside my bed; later, when I visited during holidays, he would move from his hallway pillow to my bedroom rug at some point during the night, so he was always by my bed in the morning.

We originally got him when we moved from Vancouver to Tokyo and realised that our crazy whippet-pointer-lab-etc cross would be absolutely miserable in a large Asian city (we gave him to friends with a farm in the interior of British Columbia). Pancho was our “cat” and our “compact dog”, the only natural-born Canadian in the family apart from my dad. He became known to the shopkeepers in our neighbourhood, and was taunted by the gigantic Tokyo crows. He accompanied us on weekend trips to the lake district around Mt. Fuji, where my sister and I would race him down hills on our bicycles, and then take turns bundling him into our jackets and riding along the roads between the rice paddies, with his head sticking out under our chins.

He managed the move to Hong Kong admirably. He loved running along the beaches in Repulse Bay and Stanley, and in the country park around the reservoir at Tai Tam. He joined us on weekend hikes up the hills of Hong Kong island, even at the height of summer, when he would collapse, panting, in any shade he could find if he got too hot. He picked up the habit of hunting small birds, much to the consternation of our wonderful (and very Buddhist) Thai helper, Tum, who utterly adored him. On the other hand, he once saved the life of a frog by barking at a snake that was about to eat it (whether this was a case of gallant bravery or general dimwittedness is perhaps a question best left unanswered).

As he became older, he became a wonderful curmudgeon. You could have set your watch to his demands for walks — never noisy, but always insistent. And, once on a walk, he had very definite ideas about where he would go, exactly how long he would go there, and when it was time to go back.

I was not there for his last move, to Singapore, but visited last summer and saw him in high spirits, exploring the lush botanical gardens, and revelling in the wide open grassy spaces. At home, he still had his annoying habit of blending into the carpet, which frequently led to him getting punted across the room. He still loved sembei, the Japanese rice crackers, though having lost many of his teeth, they could prove hard to chew. He still acted like he was on crack after a bath, when he would race around the house with his ear to the floor, responding to the slightest movement by rocketing off in the opposite direction. He still proved entirely susceptible to tummy rubs, which would send his legs into spasms.

And every morning when I woke up, I still found him sleeping on the rug beside my bed.

Pancho, we will miss you.

Inspired by my new job, a contribution to a silly internet meme:

A few months ago, I posted pictures of my Beijing commute from home to my language school. Since then, I have moved from my old apartment in Beijing’s northwestern university area to an apartment within the city’s Second Ring Road. The Second Ring traces the line once drawn by the imperial moat and city walls, so I am now living in “Old Beijing” — you can find my alley (or hutong) on Qing dynasty maps from the 18th century. In addition to a new flat, I also have a new commute destination in the city’s Central Business District (CBD) on the East Third Ring. I am blessed with perhaps one of the city’s most pleasant commutes, as it takes me along the old imperial lakes (Shichahai/Houhai), around the back of Jingshan Park to the northern end of the Forbidden City, and then east-southeast past Chaoyangmen to the Third Ring. According to Google Earth, the total route is 9.43km/5.86 miles. Here is a map of the route.

Since taking these pictures, I’ve discovered an alternate route that takes me through one of Beijing’s pleasantly leafy embassy areas. It diverges from the following route after I pass the massive Chinese Foreign Ministry building, and in a happy coincidence takes me past the North Korean embassy. I’ll try to post pictures of that route soon.

And now, the pictures!

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No more did My Very Educated Mother Just Serve Us Nine Pizzas.

Photos from a ride out to the Fragrant Hills (香山) area in the Northwest of Beijing.

David Moser, of the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, has written a wonderful article entitled “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard”. A short excerpt on learning classical Chinese:

“Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here’s a secret that sinologists won’t tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway. An uninitiated westerner can no more be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself, if transported to the present, could understand the entries in the “personal” section of the classified ads.”

Moser does a great job of communicating the frustrations of studying Chinese (it takes a “kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective”), and wins bonus points for describing the guilty, if intensely satisfying, pleasure of seeing a Chinese person unable to remember a character for a common word.

Click to read the rest.