It had been a while since I picked up Shanghai's free morning metro/light-rail paper, the 时代报, so I made sure to grab one when I saw them being handed out this morning on my way to work.  As I combed through it tonight over my dumpling dinner at 大娘水饺's new location on Nanjing East Road<a href="#nanjingdonglu">[1]</a> before I went to dance class, I saw more than a fair share of amusing and/or interesting articles, so I decided to blog a few of them:

<dl>
<dt>上海城市交通业务实现一门式服务</dt>
<dd>"The City of Shanghai Traffic Services Implements One-Stop Service".  The first sentence of the article goes something like "After today, when citizens need to process transportation-related paperwork, they won't need to run back and forth from here to there anymore; instead, they can solve all of their problems at a single place."  That's 东跑西颠.</dd>
<dt>我国方便面消费世界第一</dt>
<dd>"Chinese Leads The World In Spending On Instant Noodles", which are actually called "convenient noodles" in standard mainland Mandarin.  Interesting facts: China's spending is about a third of the world's total; the average Chinese citizen ate 21 portions last year; and the number two through five countries are Indonesia, Japan, the USA and Korea.</dd>
<dt>娶大本学历者可奖3000元</dt>
<dd>"Marry A College Graduate, Pocket An RMB 3000 Prize".  This article is about a small town near Zhuhai, in southern China near Macau, that offers prizes to young people who can attract  spouses that  can "提高本村人口素质", increase the qualty of the town's population.  Prize amounts are RMB 3000 (about 360 dollars, probably a couple months of salary) for marriage to a college graduate, and RMB 1500 for marriage to a vocational school (大专, dazhuan) graduate.</dd>
<dt>女植物人断水粮12天突现转机</dt>
<dd>Just so this paper doesn't sound like a total joke, here's a serious article about the lady on life support in the US.  I just thought it was funny that they refer to her as 植物人, literally "plant-person".  Has she been called a human vegetable in the US?</dd>
<dt>收费公园“免费日”取消</dt>
<dd>Here's another one that is more intersting than funny: "Shanghai Park 'Free Days' Abolished'.  The reason is that most parks in Shanghai used to charge admission (including People's Park when Josh, Mike and I went there in the summer of 2000, ironically), so the city has been making a show of slowly converting more and more parks to free entry.  Fuxing Park, Zhongshan Park, Changfeng Park, Luxun Park, and People's Park are among the 23 parks that will turn free starting tomorrow, April 1st (haha, now it's revealed that I'm forward dating my entries).  The article also addresses park hours, saying that they will not change, and public restrooms, which will remain non-free after 8am in the morning (“在早上八时之前，必须对晨练游客免费开放", they will be free before 8 AM for morning excercisers).  Note that Century Park is still charging for admission, RMB 10 when I went a few months ago.</dd>
</dl>

<a id="nanjingdonglu">[1]</a> Where, in the course of a forty minute stroll up and down the famous pedestrian street looking for a Swiss Army Knife, I was approached and had conversations with three pairs of young women and one single man about taking them out for a coffee or drink, or going to a "student bar", respectively.  They were all pretty polite about my refusing, since during the course of each invitation it came out that I was living in Shanghai, and we ended up speaking in Chinese.