I think I have commented before that the Chinese people I encounter seems to be strangely susceptible to fads. It could be my imagination, but the absolute abundance of iphones seems to me to be pretty damning evidence, particularly when when considers that there are an y abundance of cheap but satisfactory Chinese made smart phones on the market. Starbucks is a another good example, particularly considering how few other coffee shops there are, and how limited their success is.

So when the Olympics came (and now, thankfully, went) there was a huge upspike in Chinese patriotism. Just like with all other countries, the Chinese seem not to be immune from the desire to have a vicarious win. It’s just so great when a person with whom you share nothing but a god damn passport does gets rewarded for something you cannot do. But the real question is, just how will this effect the every day life of the populace, besides the people who two months ago reassured me that they could not be in any way troubled with sports all of a sudden having to stop everything that they are doing to watch the God damn volleyball game against… Syria? Serbia, Slovenia? One of those ‘S’ countries.

But it was only about a week ago that I noticed a number of students coming in to my classes with the strange circular bruises on their body. I had never seen such bruises before, even with the many months of blazing hot weather we have had pre-Olympics leading to our students, male and female, to all be relatively scantily clad. But now, students seem to be riddled with them with the circular discolorations typical of new fangled ‘ancient Chinese tradition of cupping’. Sure, it is supposedly something that is originally Chinese of origin, but so was SoCo and lime, and it still took a god damn marketing campaign to get that shit off the ground back in the 00’s.  I simply refuse to believe that it is just in this season that people need cupping done.

Cheeky update: Here is another case in point. People now won’t shut up about four loko