Eating sunflower seeds

By:  January 26, 2023 Categories: 

Long waits for chargers during the Spring Festival holiday. We’re near the border of Jiangxi & Anhui, and we cannot find a battery swap — so we need to charge as well. We’re already charging but the new cars arriving have no space to queue and randomly find spots. It’s a funny spectacle. The Tesla jumps the queue and reverses into the charging spot, but the tiny white car came here first! The owners step out and quarrel for a long time. They agree on the order, but the woman of the Tesla still stands on the charging spot: “Ok, but I still don’t want to move.” Finally, she moves, the tiny car can charge — only to discover the fast-charging plug doesn’t fit! “Ai, how do I get home now?!”

(We’re just bystanders entertained by the quarrel — so in Chinese this is described as 吃瓜: Eating sunflower seeds.)

Latest

Degrees of wealth

Degrees of wealth

In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China? Neither question is […]
July 11, 2026
Goodbye to Guanyin

Goodbye to Guanyin

It’s a Saturday morning, and we’re in a taxi on the way to the airport. My clothes cling to my body and already reek of sweat, and that’s even before our 12-hour flight has started. Today I woke up at 5:30 to get up early and throw away the last furniture and items we used […]
June 30, 2026
Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Learning Chinese, or any language, makes you more aware of language in general. And one thing that surprised me is that, despite Mandarin being so different from my mother tongue (Dutch), both languages reach for the same units when weighing things: the kilogram (公斤, gōngjīn) and the half-kilogram (斤, jīn). It’s a small thing, but […]
June 24, 2026
Cake and Timepieces

Cake and Timepieces

There are multiple ways to define Shanghai. There’s the more modern version, with beautiful lanes full of expensive yoga studios or artisan coffee shops, lined with the London Plane Tree (法国梧桐) and the Wukang Mansion (武康大楼), and renovated parks like the North Bund (北外滩) and West Bund (西岸). There’s also the Shanghai as the international […]
June 23, 2026