THE WEEK: Singles shopping

Singles shopping

Across China delivery men are in the midst of their busiest time of the year as they hurriedly deliver the millions of packages of goods bought on Wednesday, better known in China as Singles Day. But forget lonely hearts, in China Singles Day is about one thing and one thing only - shopping. On November 11 every year online shopping platform taobao.com has a massive sale and it's quickly turned the date into the biggest shopping day in the world. The numbers are pretty mind blowing, one minute after midnight this year sales reached 1 billion yuan and they hit 10 billion yuan at only 12 minutes and 28 seconds into the day long sale. Employees of taobao.com's parent company Alibaba were so busy they had to sleep in tents in their office. The sale is so big, that Alibaba even got Hollywood superstar Kevin Spacey to appear in a commercial promoting it.

Dancing in the street

One of the fantastic things about China is that people really do dance in the street here. No matter where you travel in the country you will likely come across large groups of people, mainly woman of a certain vintage, having a bit of a boogie in a public place. Recently history was made, kinda, when 18,000 women wearing identical red tracksuits danced in unison to a funked up version of the classic Chinese folk song Xiaopingguo or Little Apple, take a look.

Pharaoh enough?

For some lighthearted news US politics! American's are currently in the process of choosing who from their two major parties will run for President. On the Democrats side it's probably going to be Hillary Clinton, on the Republican side, things are a bit interesting. There is Donald Trump who likes saying things like "you're all losers" and looks like the living embodiment of a cob of corn.

Then there is Ben Carson, the former brain surgeon. Carson made headlines this week when he claimed the Pyramids in Egypt were built by Biblical character Joseph, and were used for storing grain. Now look, we don't claim to be expert historians at The Week and we're certainly not brain surgeons, but considering Joseph lived a couple of hundred years before the pyramids were built and the structures themselves are full of dead Egyptians suggests that Carson has this one a little wrong.

（中国日报网英语点津 Helen 编辑）