Trending in Beijing: Nearsighted Troubles, Laowai-Friendly T-Shirts, and Heatwave Victims
The fun, the strange, and the what-on-earth-is-this? Trending in Beijing is a wrap-up of top stories in Beijing as told by the trending hashtags, local press, and general power of the internet.
Phone cameras are the new glasses?
Near-sighted Chinese netizens have created a hashtag so they can get together and commiserate about the troubles they encounter every day. Can't make out the number of the platform your train departs from? They've been there. Can't read the fast-food menu fast enough to be ready to order by the time you get to the counter? They have also been there.
Since ordering food plays a major role in the everyday life of young urbanites, the hashtag reads #当代近视年轻人的点餐方式# (contemporary ways of ordering food for near-sighted young people).
Amongst a pool of netizens writing "it's too real" or "this is totally me every day" one netizen appeared surprised with the whole trend. "I thought it was only me who was so clever," he wrote. The hashtag now has more than 440 million readers so it seems that a pretty portion of young Chinese suffers from myopia! It's probably time to get that eye yoga trend up and running...
Finally, a T-shirt that will make traveling in Beijing easier
If you still don't know what the Bird's Nest, the performing art center, or the Peking Man Site are called in Chinese, then this super functional T-shirt is for you! There are actually two different styles of foreigner-friendly T-shirts, both adapted to helping tourists get around Beijing. One of the shirts, which was spotted on Taobao and shared on Weibo by enthused netizens, covers key sightseeing spots, while the other is designed to help you construct a sentence based around eating, drinking, and transportation.
Netizens are praising such ingenuity under #北京面向国外游客售卖的T恤# (T-shirt for foreign tourists in Beijing) a hashtag that currently has over 220 million readers, and the comment which has gathered the most attention calls for a global edition.
Want to get one for yourself or family members? Order it on Taobao.
Beijing heatwave takes a toll on riders
As we are sure you are well aware, on Jul 22, Beijing suffered through a day of truly scorching temperatures, and Sihui station located a few stops east of Guomao was literally and figuratively a transport hotspot. During the morning rush, ten passengers fell ill while at the station and had to be rushed out to the medical personnel.
Sihui train platform is located on the ground level which leaves it exposed to the outside temperatures, unlike the cooler underground ones, and the station gets particularly busy during the rush hours since it is a transfer station for passengers traveling to CBD. Yours truly once had to let seven trains pass before finally being squeezed onto the train by kind strangers queueing up behind.
Sihui, which reportedly welcomes about 100,000 passengers per day, is now titled "The hottest subway station in Beijing." Netizens are following the story under #北京最热地铁站# (hottest subway station in Beijing), which currently has around 3 million readers.
READ: How to Pull Through The Dog Days of Summer
Images: Weibo
