Recently in 1. The chRoNIcles Category
yesterday yh2 and yh juniors and yh's grandma went to visit the 'national AAAA sight seeing' venue, makes pple reflect (if pple bother to) if the grading means anything at all. reflects real badly on the country itself (i think it's not just shanghai's reputation that's at stake here). MOST if not all the interactive displays were OUT OF ORDER. cant say how disappointed yh juniors are during the visit (and grandma's impression as a visitor).
so if you are reading this post and making some plans to tour shanghai in the near future (cant say for sure how LONG they will take to fix it, if anyone bothers to fix anything since they let it deteriorate in the first place), go there if you are really bored with nowhere to go and too much cash to spare.
this is my first impression of the chinese local when i came upon this land some 8 months ago. this is so because back in singapore, we would address each other by (first) names only but here in china, friends would call out to each other names in full (last+first names). to a singaporean chinese, if someone were to call you that way, it's probably something bad that you have done :P
have not had the time to dig out the reason behind this observation and a chance arises when we were required to do a mini assignment for the cultural linguistics module. hence i used the chance to dig out some materials from the internet to get some preliminary observations. here's the report (written in Chinese) that i handed up 2+ weeks ago.
if you are a 新加坡华人 reading this post, it may interest you, though be minded that the findings are very preliminary, and further research using sociolinguistics methods with large samples is needed to uncover more about the phenomenon.
once again it's 烟花处处响 out there which is better than any Dolby Digital Surround effect. it's the 15th day into the Chinese New Year and you can find a detailed overview of the Lantern Festival here that traced its history back to the Han dynasty. very quickly some related keywords are 元宵/汤圆、灯笼、灯谜、中国的情人节 just to name a few.
and here's a photo of yh3 with his 灯笼 (supposed to be a "兔子灯" but we din managed to get one that's rabbit-shaped).
to mark the end of the cny celebration, here's the one and only cny greeting card that i received via snail-mail this year:
something to cherish dearly :)
立春 does not serve much meaning in the past, but here in shanghai, i have finally found the meaning to this term. could be 心理作用, but the FEEL of today's weather's contrastively good and there's sunshine for most part of the morning and afternoon, and daylight is noticeably longer (just to add to the 心理作用 coz i have noticed the daily extension of daylight since the winter solstice 冬至)
what's 立春？ the explanation by our experts from the shanghai meteorological bureau is on the next page ... BUT before that, here's 2 photos to share:
yh3 standing proudly with his first snowman ever!
AND
a view of shanghai outside our window after 5 days of record-breaking snowing.
you can compare it with the 'before' to see the effect :)
[updated 20080204 1220hr]
some of you experienced problem viewing the stream on-the-fly, so here's the ZIP file containing it (content: 1 html file, 1 px file, 1 plugin-installation exe file, 1 README.txt).
if you are not sure what to do after unzipping the file, check out README.txt
URL: http://yh2.com/files/photos/20080201-photostream.zip
enjoy and Live Long & Propser ;)
[orig post]
accessing flickr from where i am is near impossible for (un)known reason(s), so it's been eons since i updated yh juniors' photos to the album.
am in the midst of preparing/reading for my last 2 examinable assignments, and hav strayed away from my work (will be surprised myself if i din), and so hav decided to put together this photo stream which is pretty easy to create with proshow.
the photostream object is BIG (18MB) so it'll take quite a long while to load on a 512k broadband connection. it utilises the prodex presenter plugin which will be downloaded automatically (you may have to authorise the installation though)
hope you'll like it when it's finally d/led :)
《5天创下新纪录!——申城迎来建国以来最大雨雪量》
2008年1月25日下午起，上海地区出现雨雪天气，全市各区县普遍出现了明显的积雪，截止29日8时，市区累计雨雪量已达54.4毫米，市区积雪最深达 4厘米，郊区崇明雪深为17厘米。雨雪量为建国以来最大。市区雪深为1991年以来最大。郊区雪深为1984年以来最大。
1991年12月25-28日的连续降雪，市区雨雪量为18.5毫米，雪深5厘米，郊区金山雪深为10厘米。
1984年1月17、18日连续两天的大雪，市区雨雪量达46.7毫米，雪深5厘米，郊区嘉定雪深为17厘米。
始于2008年1月25日下午的雨雪天气已持续了5天。其持续时间为1964年以来最长。
1964年2月17-24日，发生在上海地区的大雪过程共持续了8天，市区积雪深度达14厘米。
原载《上海气象信息网》
today marks exactly our 5 months in shanghai, and it's snowing quite heavily outside where we are. there isnt any snowing last year so guessed we are quite lucky (in the good n bad sense).
a few more photos to mark this SNOWY occasion ...
