“The song of the valley”. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? If would be great for you if you could find a Chinese name that translates into something like that, wouldn’t it?

There’s a very famous casestudy of the Coca-Cola company. Here’s the bit from Wiki :
“It is often repeated as an urban legend that the Coca-Cola company mistranslated its product’s name into a string of characters meaning “Bite the wax tadpole” while attempting to market the product in Chinese. In reality, some local Chinese shopkeepers did create their own signs in an effort to approximate the sound of the product’s name, resulting in kǒukē-kǒulà (口蝌口蜡), which might more literally be translated as “mouth tadpole, mouth wax”. However, the Coca-Cola company …

Every now and again, I get bored and curious so I take a look at some stats. My favorite statistics has to be the one that shows me what site directed people to find my site. I don’t get many visits on this site, but most of the visits to this site are from people searching for some thing on Google or Technorati and noticing my blog on their search results. Out of the latest 200 hits that I got, here are some of the search terms that brought people here (if it appears more than once, then it’s because people searched for it more than once) : asian girls vietnamese girls asian beauty israeli girls military blogs army …

"Kol Ha-ir" ("Voice of the city"/"All the city"), the local Jerusalem newspaper, has a neat section on nostalgic TV shows in Israel. Up till not too long ago, maybe 15 years, Israel had only 2 TV channels available and even that was an improvement after many years of having only one TV channel to watch. When I was going through the firsts years of school, there was only thing you could watch, but - somehow, that didn't keep us from watching whatever it is that they were feeding us. In a way, some of those TV shows they screened back then became cult shows that have influenced my whole childhood. So, I'll take this opportunity to list some TV shows …

(Referring to Doubting to Shuo’s article “The Sesame Chicken Factor”. I’m even using his structure and words… :P)

One thing about living in Taiwan as an Israeli is that people already have a great deal of exposure to the Israeli issue. As a result, many feel that they have a good understanding of happenings in Israel, especially about politics. Unfortunately, much like Israelis have a very one dimensional exposure to, say, China, the international media only portrays a certain side of Israel. As an Israeli who has traveled around East-Asia and Australia in the past year, I can say it’s downright shocking to see how different this country, or even the city of Jerusalem, looks on the television sets …

I’m white. White… coming from where ever it is that my ancestors came from, I was created into being white. I didn’t choose to be white, I didn’t ask anyone to be white, and right now - there’s nothing that I can really do about it. It’s one of those things that you just can’t change, but something that you’re being referred to and defined by all the time.

In Vietnam, I was a skin-color god. I have no idea where the white-worship came from, but it was quite remarkable that everytime I went out to have something to eat with a Vietnamese girl, the second she would step out the door into a sun-light, she would completely cover her all …

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‘Now! Now!’ cried the Queen. ‘Faster! Faster!’ And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.
The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, ‘You may rest a little now.’
Alice looked round her in great surprise. ‘Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’
‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’
‘Well, in OUR country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get …