Tag: Armchair travel
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A Totally Impractical Expat Interview #6: Fiona Reilly of Life on Nanchang Lu
Welcome to the sixth interview in my infinite series of one sided conversations with expats (and ex-expats) all over the world. I started this series partly out of curiosity and partly out of a need for me to know I wasn’t alone in having mixed feelings about the path I had chosen. Now, with half…
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Notes on Genocidal Tourism in Cambodia
One of the emotionally complicating factors of constantly living in and travelling through countries with troubled pasts is that you will inevitably end up having many conversations with and interacting with people who had lived through that troubled past. And given that troubled pasts often involved death, betrayal, torture, imprisonment and whatnot, it’s a disconcerting…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) The Fabric Market
One of the more precarious aspects about living abroad has been finding clothes to cover my body. In Turkey, I discovered that my arms, legs and torso were significantly longer than the average Turk of my hip-waist measurements so all my shirt cuffs ended about an inch shy of my wrists (mighty cold in…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) Summer Nights
Shanghai summers are deeply unpleasant. Temperatures tend to hover in the mid 30s, with weather forecasts adding ‘feels like 45+’ just below the technically correct temperature. Humidity has been around 85% lately, which, really, honestly, is pretty freaking awful. We have the dehumidifier running nearly non stop in the living room because if we…
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On Language Burnout After a few too Many Countries
It’s a funny thing starting an expat/travel blog sixteen years after you started travelling/living elsewhere and failed to do anything else with your adult life except, well, travel and be an expat. For one, you’re not as freshly enthusiastic as those who are venturing out on their first big trip or landing in their first…
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The Queen of Unfortunate Search Engine Optimization
This particular blog has only been alive since late April this year- not even a toddler, really. When I did my writing course at Matador U back in WinterSpring, one of the things we focussed on was SEO- Search Engine Optimization, or, how to be found amongst the masses. The intarwebs are a mighty big…
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Awesome Things We Ate in Myanmar
Before we went to Myanmar, we really had no idea what to expect, food-wise. It wasn’t a cuisine that was well represented in the South East Asian culinary repetoire internationally. We knew it was just across the water from all things Indian and Bangladeshi, and surrounded on the other side by Thailand and China, with…
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Photos from Yangon
I’ve been experimenting with ways to get my photos up on here without having to go through Facebook links each time. Below is my attempt at uploading my Yangon album into a WordPress gallery. If you weren’t able to get past the Great Firewall to access the photos I posted yesterday, here is my first…
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Can I Show You a Bit of Myanmar?
And we’re back. And I’ve been floored with a tummy bug that whacked me over the head sometime last night, after we got back into Shanghai in a taxi that thought it had a jet engine. After 7 white-knuckle flights in a month (3 of them on Yangon Airways, whose motto is, unnervingly, “you’re safe…
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On travelling and on staying put
We’ve been in Myanmar about two weeks now, travelling close to the ground (usually about 6 inches from the pavement when facing backwards on a trishaw) and grinding our way from Yangon to Moulmein to Kyaiktiyo to Yangon to Mandalay to Hsipaw and I’m tired. For about two days I have been wanting to stay…
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On the road to Mandalay, eventually
You can actually fly to Mandalay from Yangon for about $75US, so the romance of the road is somewhat lessened. After bouncing around the Mon State south east of Yangon for the past week, I’ve come to value the brevity of flights. I’ve learned a few other things here, which I’ll note briefly. I’m saving…
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Notes on Yangon (which is also Rangoon)
1. Burmese script initially reminded me of the patterns woodbugs make when tunnelling into a two-by-four, then I decided it looked like binary code without the 1s, as seen through a wonky dot matrix printer, and now I’ve finally reconciled myself to the idea that it’s really just a series of counterfeiters’ adaptations of the…