I never watch TV, but I’ve been hooked on this nightly miniseries on the Chinese Travel Network lately.

It’s about a Chinese modern-day Romeo who decided to hitchhike from Beijing to Berlin to be with his girlfriend. He and his chain smoking friend set off from Beijing with a video camera, backpacks, and head west.

Most of the time they are picked up by truck drivers, with the occasional good samaritan in a luxury sedan giving them a lift. They travel all through China, eventually crossing the border in Xinjiang to Kyrgyzstan.

Shortly after, the chain smoking guy needs to go back to Beijing for some reason and Romeo is on his own. The road eventually leads through all the ‘stans to the middle east, where he passes through war-torn Afghanistan and Iraq. The last episode he was in Bulgaria, where he inadvertently ends up staying at a trucker’s brothel.

Traveler or backpacker shows are a dime a dozen in the west, but what’s really interesting about this show is seeing it from a Chinese perspective, where budget travel is just starting to catch on.

Not 小广告, but close.

This blast from the past is “Don Lapre”, a money making genius who hosted a late-night infomercial in the early 90s.

In “Making Money Secrets”, he went on and on about how he became rich by putting tiny classified ads in newspapers. According to Don, the secret was that if you could put one tiny classified ad in one newspaper, and that ad made only $30 – $40 profit in a week… and THEN you put that same tiny classified ad in newspapers all over the country… you would make a LOT of money!! Don himself claims to have made $50,000 dollars a week out of his one bedroom apartment.

Of course, Don never mentioned what these tiny classified ads that would magically generate $30 – $40 a week worth of revenue out of nothing would be… that you would find out by buying his “Making Money” package for only $39.95! But who cares! With just one tiny classified ad, you’d make that back in a week!

I always wondered why he felt the need to repeat tiny classified ads every minute or so. Just imagine the money you could make with LARGE classified ads…

China Hush recently posted an English translation of the top 10 most annoying TV commercials in China, according to members of Chinese forum Netease.

Annoying or not, some of them are absolutely hilarious.

My personal favorites are:

Beer tea 啤尔茶爽

From CH:

This beverage is not beer and not tea, a carbonated beverage which tasted like beer and tea, but has no alcohol. According to the commercial, drink beer-tea during class, drink beer-tea while driving and drink beer-tea while working. If you don’t then you are “out”.

In the commercial, a school teacher is not familiar with beer tea. The students are quick to inform the teacher: “Teacher, you are OUT.”

To emphasize just how IN they are and just how OUT anyone who does not drink beer tea is, they say OUT in English.

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