Walking down the streets of Beijing, we constantly pass glass-fronted stands with the latest free newspapers posted for anyone to read. In this context, free=government sponsored, so the articles may be a little biased. It is common to see at least a few people reading the articles. The especially popular reading locations are at the bus stops. After all, what else are you going to do while standing around waiting for who-knows-how-long since bus time schedules are not published?
In defense of the local bus system, these schedules may be coded somehow into the bus signs, but we have not yet been able to figure out the subtlety if this is true. Then again, we also couldn't see where our stop was mentioned, so inability to decipher the sign does not count for much.Wait! Late breaking update. Just checked to see if I could find our stop using our person copy of the map book and we could! We are stop 18 on the sign for the express bus 107. Very exciting. That gives me more hope for determining bus times sometime in the future... maybe... if we spend some quality time with our translating programs....
Its not clear how seriously the locals take these papers or what other sources of information are available to them. At least some of it must be entertaining though. After all, the one article that we came across that was partially in English was a column explaining American phrases like "power nap" and "working out". Now if that's not news worthy, I don't know what is.
2 comments:
How did they define powernap?
do they come along and rehang these newspapers every day?
I have a whole bunch of completely unhelpful answers for you.
1) While I remember being amused at the time, I can no longer recall any of the descriptions of what I thought were self-descriptive phrases.
2) Given that I can’t read most of the papers, I have not paid enough attention to know how often they are changed. I am guessing that it is not once a day, as there are just soooo many papers. But it is probably something like once a week.
-Cara
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