Category: Excursions
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Tiny Notes From Hanoi: It’s Kinda Different With a Kid
Welcome to this exciting new series of (hopefully) near daily updates on our very recent move to Hanoi (like, last Friday)! Between living in a compact little hotel room in an area without walkable sidewalks (but with a fine cacophany of scooters roaring at all hours) and having Thwack full time and having two separate…
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What I’m Talking About When I Talk About China
A few weeks ago, I was randomly contacted by someone working for an expat relocation company. He wanted me to write a guide for Suzhou, a city I spent a total of one afternoon in several years ago, interviewing for a temporary job doing localization editing work for a Chinese video game company producing martial…
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Leicester is For Food Nerds: A Tangentially Culinary Introduction to an Unlikely Place
Leicester (lɛstər/ les-tər) isn’t exactly on the global culinary map. It’s barely on any map at all, except perhaps one detailing manufacturers of, say, sturdy meat pies or Indian sweets. Rumour has it that people have traveled vast distances to get a big box of Burfi from one of the sweet shops in…
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A Totally Impractical Guide to Camping in England With a 4 Month Old Baby
Last weekend, we borrowed a car from our crunchy granola car-share group in Leicester and drove to somewhere in Derbyshire (pronounced, approximately, Darbəshr, in case you aren’t intuitively British*) in the cold, grey rain, for a fine weekend of family camping, frantic trail cycling (which we hiked at a leisurely pace) and multi-roomed tents more elaborate…
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I’m Learning Vietnamese, Y’all: What You Really Need To Know When Learning a New Language
I’m Learning Vietnamese. I Think I’m Learning Vietnamese. I really think so. So I’m learning another language. I’m adding Vietnamese, slowly and poorly intoned, to my slapdash mental collection of half remembered words and phrases from a dozen countries. I may have mentioned this once or twice already. After a decade of trying to cram Turkish…
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Feed Me, Leicester: Sichuan Brothers Hotpot (Woohoo!)
Remember last week when those guys at Momondo took us out for lunch at Kayal down on Granby Street and we stuffed ourselves on spicy seafoody things and massive dosas stuffed with lovely fragrant smashed spud and whatnot? Well, this week they took us out for dinner at another establishment of my choice. After walking past a…
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Feed Me, Leicester: Eating Everything Before We Go, the Kayal Edition
One of the lesser-known perks of having an overtly personal blog that occasionally masquerades as something useful is that you sometimes get some rather unexpected offers out of left field. Like last week, after I finished up my rather haphazard month of attempting happiness, I randomly got an email from the guys at Momondo, a travel…
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More Things That Are Ridiculously Easier in Your Own Language: Food!
The other day, we decided to order dinner in from a kebab shop in our neighbourhood here in Leicester. The menu was online, but it wasn’t linked to any of those nifty websites that also let you place your order and pay in advance. I’d have to call the kebab shop directly. And, like,…
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Well, That Was Certainly Interesting: Brief Notes on Having Just Spawned a Baby
Last Wednesday, I did something I’d never done before, in a way that went in a totally different way to how I had roughly planned it. Kind of like blindly climbing Mt Bromo in Indonesia at dawn, with the thick sulphur mists obscuring everything until you’re right at the lip of the volcano, or maybe…
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I Want to be Sedated: Adventures in Getting my Act Together in Leicester
People, my mind is muddled like a big ball of muddled things all muddled together with a muddling pestle. I’ve been trying to get my act together to write all of the posts that this particular point in time deserves. Of these, there are many. Changes of all sorts are afoot. Interesting, strange, complex changes.…
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Why, Hello Leicestershire: Notes on Suddenly Moving to Middle England
People, I have moved to England. The seemingly interminable spouse visa application process suddenly terminated and within a week of getting our surprise approval we were safely ensconced in a ridiculously genteel, chocolate-box village just outside of Leicester. That’s the one pronounced Lester. The standard phonemic alphabet doesn’t necessarily apply here. There’s a…
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Big Dumplings in Little China
It’s hard to write about your homeland. I’ve spent decades honing my skills at describing places from the perspective of an outsider looking in. It helps to not fully understand what’s going on, or if I actually do know what’s going on, to be just observing from the sidelines and playing dumb. It allows…