The Day I Went Viral (in the Chinese news)

Now it seems like things are slowly reverting back to normal when it comes to blog visitors as well. Before the quake I usually had a very modest number of around ~200 unique visitors, but this figure tripled and quadrupled immediately after the quake and stayed at that level up until the last few days when things seem to get back to normal. In any case, I usually consider my regular modest number of visitors to be of high quality; men and women with refined tastes and sharp intellects, so I am very comfortable with that.

One amusing thing that happened in the days after the quake was that my blog, for some odd reason, got picked up by a pretty huge Japanese news site focusing on China related news (?) called Searchina, as they did a review on what some foreign bloggers in Japan had written about the aftermath. This caused a pretty significant influx of (what I assume to be) Japanese readers and a lot of googletranslate attempts to decode the English. You could say that I went a little viral, nothing lethal and a mild cold at best, but still.

Now, this is not so entertaining for my non-Japanese reading visitors, but comparing my original post and the summary that Searchina listed is quite interesting in itself. First, take a look here at their article and then compare it to my original post here. Nevermind that they wrongly label me as american, but their summary has removed all the attempts at wit from the original post and for some reason completely omitted the Mad Max watching from their listing up of my "things to do".

I'm completely ok with their summary (apart from the insult of calling me American...) as they just have removed all traces of humour, but haven't distorted anything that I wrote, but I just have the feeling that there would be tons of other blogs that would have been more suitable to quote...? Well, in any case, thanks to the Searchina people and would always be fun to get more English capable Japanese readers!