frauke at large

Seriously!? This is your brand name? … do Chinese businesses realise that their made up brand names are strangely hilarious to foreigners? Don’t they care about meaning in a blind race to signal international-ness? If these brand names really are all their own doing why don’t they ask some professional marketer for help to avoid being the laughingstock of us laowai? Or maybe they have and some foreign consultant has just been incredibly obnoxious? Who knows, but the debate on that one has been going on ever since I arrived in China …

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Last weekend I went on a short trip to Xi’an to see the Terracotta Warriors. Xi’an itself was not the most exciting of places that I have been to; the most interesting sites were the Muslim quarter, the city walls and the Terracotta Warriors which were all quite spectacular, but the city itself was just like any other big city in China: a mixture of bad air and dusty, grotesque, grey and unfinished skyscrapers.

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After searching endlessly on the internet for a picture of one and finally giving up and coming to the conclusion that I might just have to go out and take a picture of one myself, I do feel the need to make another marketing related observation of China: 

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Despite all the signs pointing towards spring and a turn in weather, my last entry might have been a little preemptive.

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