Three random stories from the weekend

Dogs

We saw someone walking their pet dog in Hangzhou, so it prompted a conversation about dogs: pets or food? A warning – what follows is a terrible story.

Apparently most people here who keep dogs as pets do not eat dogs. But many other people do. Our Product Manager, Victor, had a pet golden retriever. He called it Big Yellow (or I guess the Chinese equivalent of Big Yellow). A few weeks ago, he heard a yelp from his dog in the middle of the night. He woke up and stumbled downstairs to check on Big Yellow. Two beggars/thieves had broken into his house, killed his dog, and were eating it! Really sad.
Everyone at the office felt bad for him, though one of the guys – Dengjia, who particularly likes dog – was (jokingly) angry that somebody else had gotten to Big Yellow first!

Text Messages
On the train to Hangzhou, I got a few text messages in Chinese from a number I did not know. After the second one, I asked somebody to read them. Apparently, when you enter a new city, that city often sends you a welcome text message, saying hello, telling you the current weather, and providing a tourist hotline in case you have any questions. None of the locals found this was even remotely interesting or unusual, but I thought it was amazing.

Umbrellas
It is considered more attractive in China (and maybe Asia more broadly?) to be light-skinned rather than dark skinned. Just as American women spend all sorts of money on tanning beds, tanning lotions, and who knows what else to make their skin look more tan, women here spend a ton of money on skin whitening products. When a woman gets too suntanned, her friends jokingly tell her that she would “be popular in the West”.

The extension of wanting whiter skin is being afraid of the sun. So whenever it is sunny, all the girls walk around with umbrellas. That in itself is not so big of a deal. But in Hangzhou, I saw a girl riding a bike and holding an umbrella to protect from the sun at the same time! As most people know, I cannot ride a bike with just one hand for more than about a second, so I found it particularly stunning. This practice is not very common and I was too slow to get any action shots, but here is a photo of my friend Ellen stopped on her bike talking on her mobile and holding an umbrella.