Steven's page

The Shanghai Wild Animal park, that bastion of politically-incorrect insensitivity and casual animal cruelty and humiliation , has been busy this May holiday, with several new shows and attractions. One of these is a bicycling bear (a tight-rope motor-cycling bear caused outrage last year at this s ...

May holiday sunshine (so far) has brought the full extent of crowds onto the streets and all forms of public transport. Having spent May 1st waiting 30 minutes for a bus that never arrived, then wondering the streets for about 20 minutes in search of an available taxi, I can tell you that public ho ...

Yes, that's what I just said: China is almost as popular as sex. That's the only conclusion that can be drawn from the New York Times website, where its 'Most searched' section of the 'Most Popular' page, lists the keywords “most frequently searched by NYTimes.com readers". As can be seen in the ...

Yes, it's almost the start of Golden Week (黄金周; huang jin zhou), as it is optimistically termed, in which about one-sixth of the world's population attempt to board every available train, bus, coach, plane, and boat in an attempt to get somewhere else for a set period of time, and then return ...

A couple of weeks ago I saw something that I've been trying to make sense of ever since. Here's what happened: I was on a bus here in Suzhou, which drew up to a set of traffic lights at an intersection. To my right, on the corner of the road, I noticed on old woman had fallen off her bicycle, and wa ...