Tag: Street Photos
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Brief Notes on 15 Days in Cambodia (part 1)
We just got back from Cambodia last night, returning to a cold, grey Shanghai and a chaotic jumble of bills, dirty laundry, empty fridge and dusty floors. The two flights from Phnom Penh to Guangzhou to Shanghai had been turbulent and cloudy and the taxi home from Hongqiao airport was lead-footed and jerky. We attempted…
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How much would YOU pay to be bit by a rabid monkey: More good times in Phnom Penh
Have I ever mentioned how much I loathe monkeys? In India, on an island just off Mumbai, a monkey once mugged me with a snarl for my bottled water; in Ubud, in Bali, a monkey lunged at me and dug his claws into my leg and wouldn’t let go. I wasn’t even teasing him with…
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Chinese New Year II: Explosions, Bunnies, Shuttered Doors
So the incessant festive explosions of last night continued until very very late, late enough for me to have filmed several chunks of an hour’s worth of explosions around midnight and still had time to upload, edit, save and upload to YouTube and then add it to yesterday’s post before it was calm enough outside…
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Chinese New Year in Shanghai: Bunnies Gone Wild
As a Rooster, Doug’s mortal enemy in Chinese astrology is the Rabbit. And lo, come tomorrow, we shall be fully immersed in the Year of the Rabbit. There are bunnies EVERYWHERE. It’s like Donnie Darko with lots of red and gold and glitter. There are sparkly cutout stickers of bunny silhouettes on department store glass…
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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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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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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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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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Nihilism in Shanghai: Everything Dies. Everything.
I’m a very optimistic person in spite of all my references to key words like ‘bleak’, ‘grim’, ‘awful’, ‘miserable’ and such. My character leans toward the melancholy but not in a depressing kind of way. I actually like rain. I like solitude. I like somber. I find them very calming. But can I tell…