Someone’s added some new, unofficial Fuwa to the group! Yaya is a duck, Tingting is a butterfly (or a dragonfly), and Dede is a cute little taxi!

The names of the real Fuwa spell out Beijing welcomes you, but with these cute new additions, it spells out Welcome to Beijing, you S.O.B.!!!! Haha!

Edit: I’ve been informed that ya ting de is more like “b@stard” than “son of a b!tch”. My Chinese skills need work!

Via 恶搞福娃“北京欢迎你丫挺的” 北方汽车维修技术论坛08版

I just saw this on Beijing Olympic Games 2008 blog, and I had to share. Fuwa sneakers!!! How cute is that?

Let me know if you see any Fuwa Chuck Taylors. I’ll be the first in line to buy some Jing-jing All-Stars!!!

Via Beijing Olympic Games 2008 blog

I actually heard about this from my stepmother-in-law, who made me promise that we wouldn’t come back from China without photos of pandes. (Did I mention that she’s quite possibly the easiest person in the world to shop for, especially in China? Although my father-in-law isn’t so crazy about adding to her panda parahenalia…)

Eight special “Olympic Pandas”, selected by popular vote from a field of 16, (though they now seem to be morphing into the “Earthquake Pandas”) arrived in Beijing on Saturday afternoon. The pandas are here for a special 6 month Olympic stint and after arriving on a special “luxury” flight from Chengdu, were set up in their comfortable digs (it’s air conditioned and comes with a daily supply of 200kg of bamboo and 40kg of bamboo shoots especially shipped in from Henan).

Via The Beijinger

Ok, I’ve been calling JingJing a little jerk for a while now, but I don’t actually attribute any real events to his actions. But a friend mentioned the “Fuwa curse” so I had to look it up. The Fuwa curse attributes one bad event to each Fuwa.

Gossip sites are full of speculation that four of the five cartoon mascots have fulfilled prophesies of doom with one more, connected to the Yangtze River, still to come, the South China Morning Post said.

Jingjing, a panda, is the animal most closely associated with Sichuan province where the earthquake struck.

Huanhuan, a cartoon character with flame-red hair, is being linked by bloggers to the Olympic torch that has been dogged by anti-China protests on its round-the-world tour.

Yingying, an antelope, is an animal confined to the borders of Tibet, which has been the scene of riots and the cause of international protests against China, the bloggers say.

Nini, represented by a kite, is being viewed as a reference to the “kite city” of Weifang, in Shandong, where there was a deadly train crash last month.

That leaves only Beibei, represented by a sturgeon fish, which online doomsayers suggest could indicate a looming disaster in the Yangtze River, the only place where sturgeon is found.

I don’t believe in this at all, but some of my coworkers do. What do you think?

Via Truth From Facts blog and the Sydney Morning Herald.

I caught the adorable little panda waving a bat, wrestling Huan Huan , and shooting an arrow at Ni Ni but Imagethief caught little Jing Jing packing heat!

That Jing Jing is at it again!

Via Imagethief

I saw this box of Fuwa Band-Aids at the drugstore yesterday, and although I’m not planning on nicking myself in the near future, just had to get it. Cute, aren’t they? They’re real brandname Band-Aids by the way, Johnson&Johnson are Olympic sponsors.

I was a bit disappointed to get it home and find that the box only held SEVEN bandages! Look at that box again, and tell you wouldn’t have expected more than seven?

I do like them, they’re cute and colorful enough to distract wee ones from a shot or a scratch. My package had at least one of every color, except black. That naughty panda JingJing is conspicuously absent! I guess he’s too busy brandishing his baseball bat to appear on a Band-Aid.

We have the Olympic Dragon made out of 2008 drinking cans, Big Beijing 2008 nail art masterpiece pieced together from 28000 colourful nails and now we got 5 Fuwas popping out from different colours of Azuki beans and Mung beans. More commonly known as “red beans” and “green beans” in Asia, the creator, Luo Qianglong (罗强龙), says his Beijing 2008 beans art expresses “Green (environment) and Humanity”.

At least we can eat this.

Beijing 2008 Bean Art Photo Gallery

I’m not really into nail art for my own hands (between preventing then from breaking, and matching my outfits to my nails, it wouldn’t work out for me), but the giant Fuwa nail picture was pretty cool.

Here’s another interesting use for the Fuwa… Fuwa condom packets!

I think little NiNi or YingYing would be a bit of a mood killer, but JingJing could definately take on the Jissbon mascot!

Via Danwei

Primary (Elementary) school students are awed by the Beijing 2008 Nail Art

I don’t understand women doing nail paintings and nail art (I don’t know if Meg got) but a nail painting master, Jin Yu (金玉), in Jiangshu, Nanjing, has left me speechless with her gigantic Beijing 2008 Nail Art masterpiece that depicts Fuwa and some great sports. Measuring 3.7 meters long and 3.1 meters wide, the whole work of art requires 28000 nails to conjure. Impressive.

I’m wondering if she can come up with The Last Supper by Lenardo Da Vinci.

Via 女人的心魔

Fuwa (Virtual)

Fuwa (Real)

The real Fuwa were seen in a New Year countdown celebration in Beijing recently. Too many of them really got me confused.

You can catch the video here.