Days before the 2008 Olympic Games, a foreigner in Beijing holds up a sign: Please give me a hug. Uncertain and unsure, most Chinese passing by avoid her. On the internet, some say it is culture difference, others just want a chance to hug a hot foreigner.

It's hot and it's crowded. If you think your local YMCA is packed with kids playing in swimming pool. Look at this and think again. You will feel lucky that you don't have to compete with hundreds in one swimming pool.

Danwei points us to this blog, on which an American professor at Peking University in Beijing details his protest of Dreamworks' Kungfu Panda. Though the description of the protest is in English, the reasons for it are notably absent.

“He was already dead by the time that I arrived,” a Chinese friend explained to me. “I rode my bicycle as fast as I could to the countryside to see the execution but in the end, I only heard the gun shot.” My friend was recounting to me the story from her hometown of a young man who had been caught stealing 400 RMB from a wealthy lady . He had been quickly handed over to the police and sentenced to death.

“Two American men were deported for sleeping with too many girls,” a foreign friend reported to me sometime ago. “They gave a number of girls hope about marriage and traveling to America and the girls willingly gave themselves to the guys.” My friend was a teacher in a small town in Central China were news always traveled fast. She explained that when the girls realized that they had been ‘used’, they complained to the local authorities who promptly arrested the men and sent them out of the country.