Category: China
-
Top 4 Tips on How to Traumatize Your Parents When They Come to Visit You
I’d call myself the prodigal daughter except I have yet to return home after my years away in the wilderness. Every year, with irregular clockwork, my kind, brave parents gird their loins, apply for visas, book astronomically priced red-eye flights and come to see me. I repay their loving parental support by allowing these visits…
-
Hello, Dalian! A Totally Impractical Guide to That City up by Korea
And by impractical, I really mean it this time. I have absolutely no information that might be of use to you here, unless you get sent up for work at the very last minute, as I did, and need to know where you can get really good sushi (*hint hint* the Grande Teda Mercure hotel…
-
How Not to Travel in China During the October National Holiday
For about a month, our conversations went something like this: “How about Thailand? If we fly in to Phuket, we could catch a ferry to X and go diving for 3 days…” “No, no- what about the decompression time after and before the flight? I’m not keen on getting the bends. And my passport only…
-
Baking in China (and other improvisational activities)
A few weeks ago, we came across a hand-me-down counter top oven on www.unclutterer.com and decided to test it. Not a toaster oven. Not a microwave oven. An oven oven. The kind that can, like, bake stuff and roast stuff and grill stuff. But I knew I was better off grilling in one of those…
-
Blue Skies, Fake Britain and Imaginary Friends: It Gets Better (For Now)
Four days ago, I was quite dissatisfied with Shanghai and with living abroad in general. I wanted to go home to Canada, to go live in the forest and bake bread and raise goats and make really awesome goat cheese and to say, quite pleasantly, fuck it to this whole expat/travel lifestyle. I was fried.…
-
I Hate Crowds: Travelling in China During National Holidays
I really do hate crowds. Crowds make me want to hit people or queue jump just to escape from the queue (because in China, some queues are so vast and switchbacky that to get out you have to go forward). I don’t like noise. I really like quiet, empty places. People en masse exhaust…
-
(101 Things About Shanghai) Plum Rains
Last night around 10, my immune system decided it felt like inviting a cold around for a visit. Just as I was readying myself for what ought to have been a full night’s sleep, my nose went awry and my eyeballs hummed. This alone would have been fine, except that when I finally dozed off…
-
On food and kitchens with three stoves
We had gone to Qiandao Lake, about three hours by car from Shanghai, for a weekend of diving: at the bottom of the the lake was a thousand year old village that had been flooded back in the 1950s for a dam project. When we arrived and suited up and threw ourselves overboard, we discovered…
-
How Not to Organize a Bike Tour in Rural China
The road ended at the edge of a crumbling cliff, after a series of abrupt structural adjustments: what had been smooth asphalt turned to dusty asphalt, then to pot-holed concrete, then to broken concrete then to gravel then to rutted, dried mud. It was when we hit the rutted dried mud that we found the…
-
The Hordes of Yangshuo
The hills are so famous that they are on the 20rmb note. Looking closely at a 20rmb note, I failed to see the armies of uniformed tour groups and the clusters of hotels and the endless checkpoints of touts and vendors surrounding the hills. They are there. I know they are. We walked amongst…
-
(101 Things About Shanghai) Taxis
Taxis in Shanghai aren’t actually particularly nifty but they are remarkably cheap and easy to get around in. A half hour trip from deepest, darkest Pudong to Puxi, with bags and bags of illicit espresso in tow and no desire to take the Metro? 30 yuan max! A half hour trip out to the…
-
Harbingers of Dumplings
“Привет!” Our presence in the tiny Russian cafe was heartily acknowledged by the old Chinese man in the fedora who had just entered, elbows linked with his small, silent wife. “Er, nihao? Hello? Hi?” “Я думал, ты русский” I thought you were Russian, he explained (in Russian). We don’t speak Russian. Our Mandarin is pitifully limited…