Saw in the news today, Ireland's Census will be available in 11 languages

The sustained high level of immigration over the past decade or so means that perhaps 10% of our population is now accounted for by non-Irish nationals.

And here is the Chinese one (Simplified only): http://www.cso.ie/census/census_2006_chinese_page.htm
(Set your encoding to UTF-8 to view the characters if you have problems.)

Heh, saw this in boingboing, the joy of earwax picking, heh... not really a Japanese thing, I think Asians do it. Well, I definately know that Chinese do it. All you Chinese out there, you must remember your own mom cleaning out your ears. It was one of my favs, it's relaxing as well. I remember letting my aunt do it, and it was not as pleasant! But I still do it. You have to use an ear pick to do the job, the cotton buds won't cut it here. Here are some ear picks for your perusal, just so you don't think it's all made up. Here is some more info on it from wikipedia.

Wierd? Relaxing? Addictive? To me, it's just a nice feeling. Plus you have clean ears to boot (as long as you are carefull, you don't want to pierce your ear drums!!).

Came across this article discussing the successful activites held in wet markets, such as

[...] the department has run large-scale Chinese New Year functions and thematic workshops on Chinese tea art, Chinese soups, meat cooking and food hygiene. Other promotion activities, including lucky draws, photo-taking and menu design contests, as well as roving exhibitions, have also been held.

Wet markets are so much cleaner than they use to be. Air-conditioned, washed at least daily. It does not stink as much, and this is summer! I remember back in the days (when I was 12 years old or so), my only memory was holding my nose while mom brought me into the market to get fresh meat and fish (and veg). But nowadays, trying to convince my fiancé and his dad that they use to be very dirty was quiet difficult to describe. Considering that we ate brekkie there a few mornings!

A friend emailed me recently about my last post about Moore Street, and he was saying that I should have called it 毛街. Would more Chinese folks think of Mao Tse Tung! Heh, I would be inclined to think of hair or fur myself. *lol

He also said

I knew there was a Chinese pub beside the Alilang Korean restaurant on Parnell street (the eastern part of Parnell Street compared with O'Connell Street, not the same side as UGC). I never went in. From the outside it looked pretty grotty. Maybe it's changed. And I knew it was called 酒酒吧.

Came across this article commenting on the Moore St on how multi-ethnic it has become. Well, we all know that living here, but more and more tourists notice this. And more of these travel articles point that out. I did not even know there was a pub where Asians hang out. Well, there you go. Heh, I normally go to the pubs on the Southside, although I might go to Pravda or D2 sometimes.

The success of the Polish Herald pullout in Dublin has been a success, that they are considering a Chinese pullout as well!

We are already thinking about possible pull-out supplements for the 100,000-strong new Chinese community in Dublin [...]

National Road safety leaflets will be available for 10 languages, Chinese included.

Here is the press release from the National Safety Council. You can download the file here.

I recently came across this article acout pantyhose tea. I tried this before in one of the food stalls (like Dai Pai Dong in Cantonese) in the old market place in Tai Po Hui. My aunt tells me at the time, that this type of tea is very smooth and silky, unlike normally made tea. All I could think of, it's been strained through silk stockings! But I tried it, and it tastes different than the other tea in HK, mostly because they use evaporated milk instead of good ol' cow's milk. Heh, cow's milk is not all the common in HK. A visiting cousin a few years back to Limerick, just could not get enough of our Dawn/Golden Vale milk. He drank loads each day.

You can read more on HK's diffrent types of tea here.

I'll think I will stick to "Ling Muk", honey and lemon water when I visit HK.