The Israeli channel 2 morning show recently featured an interview with an English speaking Chinese tour-guide who takes mainland Chinese groups to visit Israel. The short interview provides some insights into how the Chinese see Israel and offers some curious cross-cultural interactions.     Here’s the video : (Hebrew introduction) A: You’ve been to China? [...]

The current Israeli prime minister – Benjamin Netayahu – spoke at the last Israeli Business Convention and elaborated the importance of introducing Chinese studies to the Israeli education system. I’ve known about this for quite a while, but I finally got around to listen to his speech.     Here’s the video of Benjamin Netanyahu [...]

3 years after I wrote about the first signs of the Israeli Chinese studies trend and there are signs that the trend is still going strong (see “The Chinese Language Studies Trend in Israel” and “Channel 2 story : Israelis studying Chinese” for more info). Every once in a while, Israeli news channels rediscover this [...]

I know a few cross-cultural couples who live in Israel and every once in a while when I go back to Israel I get to meet a few more. It’s only natural, since I am on the Israel-Asia line and many of the people I know are western expats living in Asia or Asians living [...]

The Miss Universe 2010 just ended, with Mexico taking the title. A few years ago when I started doing those Asian Miss Universe comparisons (see end of the post), I was going through the Miss Universe Asian models to try and sense some of the differences in appearance between the Asian nations – as the [...]

When you picture old China, what comes to mind? If you want to feel more of old Chinese-style Shanghai you need to move away from the colonial areas and the modern skyscrapers and venture onto the water towns surrounding Shanghai City. While there are quite a few water town options, the closest one to central [...]

Nearing the end of a quick trip to the Balkans, and just before heading back through the Sofia airport, I visited Rila Monastry. High up in the mountains, through traitorous roads, is a beautiful fort-like monastery, which has one of the most spectacular inner halls I’ve ever seen in a monastery, full of symbols, stories [...]

  Taking the net by a storm are videos of the Chinese Red Army lipsynced to popular modern, and many of them western, songs. Scenes taken from the Long March Song Cycle movie (长征组歌) from back in 1976 are edited to create terrific parodies that give new meanings to the songs.     Of all [...]