You know those chain e-mails with funny pictures from <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />China? Well yesterday I got to take a photo that could be part of those mails: <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

I don't think the boxes were very heavy, but you couldn't see the poor lady steering this load, not from left nor from right. The day before I saw the equivalent of this on a car. Except that the fastening had just given in, and the boxes were all over the toll way exit. I am glad we were going to the other direction, as there was an immediate queue. A long one. Unfortunately my camera (i.e. my phone) was not readily available, and I didn't get a shot. 

You know how it takes forever before e.g. road work is done, from start to finish, in Finland? Have you EVER seen a city-worker on site after 15:59 in the afternoon? When the city of Tampere build the underpass for pedestrians in our (Finnish) home street. There was a sign that the pass would be ready in the autumn 2006. Well, it was late summer 2007 when it actually was ready. They didn't even take the sign down, which I found hilarious. They can't even get that done! Maybe they wanted to amuse the locals... Same with our home road, the progress was sooo slow. It took them months to re-do few hundred meters of that small road.

Here that would not work. There are so many projects going on, that if small things would take forever, daily commuting would become impossible. So they work. Every day. And every night!

The metro network is quite new here (less than 10 years, someone said only about five?), and it is constantly expanded, which is excellent. One of those expansion building sites is basically in our "front yard" (we don't have a yard, but it is on the left in front of the building we live). So when I go to the bed at 11 pm, there are men working. When I wake up at three am in Saturday night, they are exploding something (well, that's clearly what woke me). When I wake up at 8 am, they are already there, working. 

Below a shot of our "internal home street renovation work", taken last night around 10 pm. They are changing the tiles, although I have no idea why. For a layman, the old ones look to be in good condition. The old ones actually match with the building color. I hope they don't intend to start changing the building to match the new tiles... It has now been couple of days of this tile changing, and I am pretty sure it's going to be done before I depart to Finland next Friday. (Do note, that somethings tend to be similar independent of the country. See the arm of a man on the bottom left corner of the photo? Here, as in Finland too, they need someone to oversee the work and just stand around.)

I was coming from the movies, when I took the shot. It was a romantic comedy, with a twist of adventure. "Fools Gold" (no idea if it has a Finnish translation). Like I mentioned before, the selection of movies available here in English is very limited. Except on illegal DVDs, of course. Anyway, I thought a romantic flick would not be such a bad thing after being here alone for a month.

Couple of times it was evident a piece had been snatched from the movie. And  those pieces were cut so badly by the "China Bureau of Film and TV Administration" or what the heck it was that was mentioned before the movie started, that there was no doubt about it: censorship. Because it was missing, I couldn't tell what they had removed. But the third time something was missing, the character referred to the missing piece, and I understood they had censored sex.

Just a couple of days ago I watched <?xml:namespace prefix = st2 ns = "urn:schemas:contacts" />Larry King Live (which of course is here shown in the morning) when an American comic was making seriously mocking China, and I was waiting that the screen would go black, but nothing happened. I expected political stuff to be censored to some extend. But this: sex censored from a romantic comedy. I did not see this coming.

Unrelated to all this, I have to post couple of shots from Fuxing Park I took yesterday. It was actually a Budweiser / Beijing 2008 add: sports figures made from beer cans. But they were quite fun. Here we have a weightlifter:

And a sprinter:

All the figures had signs saying something about previous Olympics, so here is Helsinki 1952. But would someone mind telling me what's heck is the figure about? Swordsman against the Lochness monster?