Tag: China
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(101 Things About Shanghai) The Bund, reformatted
Although I’ve been living in Shanghai for about a week shy of two years now, I’ve only been to the Bund 4 times. The first 3 times were fairly pointless as it was being renovated, just like everything else in Shanghai. The first time I went, I was on the Pudong side looking across and…
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Meat and Mops- My Parents’ Journey to Qibao
So we went to Qibao yesterday, our first grand excursion in a week or so, as I’d been busy with stupid school stuff and having my jaw sledge-hammered, and my mother was battling her semi-inevitable post-flight cold. Doug and I had gone there about two years ago when we first moved to Shanghai, back when…
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School’s out for…um, Spring Festival (insert Alice Cooper tune here)
Classes finished nearly two weeks ago but the final exam for my course was scheduled only for the very last possible time slot. This means I’d spent the first week off hauling my parents around town and drinking absurd amounts of coffee, sitting in the living room in my awesome new high-tech thermals (thank you,…
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Good Times: Getting Your Wisdom Teeth Yanked Out Away From Home
I have evil, appalling wisdom teeth, the kind that come in at all the wrong angles. I have a dentist who would help me with this, as this is where I go in Lafayette for every dental issue. But this time, I could not. Or rather, I had evil, appalling wisdom teeth. Over the past…
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Short film: Shanghai Museum and the Former French Concession
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A Series of Partially Related Photos: Walking With my Parents in Shanghai
They arrived yesterday and they are jetlagged. However, I was a cruel daughter and we went on a veritable Long March around Shanghai until they screamed for mercy. Here are a few covert phone photos. First of all, at the corner of Fuxing Lu and Xiangyang Lu, en route to coffee, there was a masterful…
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It’s MAO’s Annual Self Criticism Time, Shanghai Style
I missed the new year deadline for resolutions by a few days but I was too busy drinking litres of tea in bed and eating Doug’s Christmas gift of German chocolate covered gingerbread and posting endless photo spam of frozen mops and singing students. Sometimes one just has to tread lightly upon the blog before dropping…
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The Chinese Christmas Party Post! (Part 2)
Remember how my students organized a Christmas party in a tea house at the side of an eight lane ring road, under the shadow of a spider’s web worth of overpasses? Where I feasted on *sigh* everything that features heavily in my almost-but-not-quite worst nightmares? The grinning whole fish with the staring eyes and the…
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Shanghai is Tropical, Part 2
Remember that delusional law that says every city south of the Yangtze River is Tropical and therefore needn’t have, say, indoor heating in public buildings or properly insulated flats? Yes, that one. I would like to take a moment to show you a few scenes from tropical Shanghai on the first day of 2011. Temperature…
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Ain’t I a Bear? Gerald the Bear Tackles Authenticity and Place
When I was first introduced to my co-blogger, Mary Anne, who is also the owner of this blog, she looked at me dubiously and said, “You’re not a panda”. We were in a tea house in North Shanghai, surrounded by hundreds of Chinese students and teachers and wait staff. On the ceiling were red lanterns…
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Gerald the Bear is accepting freelance blogging opportunities now!
I just wanted to take a moment out of your presumably busy day to introduce you to my new co-blogger, Gerald the Bear. Gerald joined me late last week, thanks to an introduction from my thoughtful students at the university Christmas party. So far, Gerald has proven to be a thoughtful, insightful bear, filled not…
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My Students Gave Me Stuff for Christmas!
This is going to be a very short post. I just wanted to show you my haul for this year, from my students. First, the big one: And then two smaller gifts combined: And finally, the slightly crumpled gourd-y ornament: Oh, and the three apples. I gave one to the…