During the summer, we leave our windows open to lessen the pain of baking in a concrete oven. While our apartment becomes cooler, it also becomes dirtier, even though we have screens on our windows and live on the 11th floor. Every week, I sweep up the mess, a dirty affair that takes about an […]
China has blocked Instagram due to certain sensitive events down south in a well-known semi-autonomous city. Instagram, my lone remaining lifeline to social networking with the West. The reason I got an iPhone. Is gone.
The Guardian ran a longish piece on the Beijing subway by Tania Branigan. Here are some facts: It is late summer and the carriages are crammed, but air conditioning keeps it cool, blowing wafts of recently applied deodorant across the crowd. Who in China, besides foreigners, wears deodorant? According to Boyfriend, one of his coworkers […]
It was time to get a new visa, so back to the States I went. The visa run, a time-honored tradition for expats living in China, may seem quite inconvenient, but I love the opportunity to travel on the company’s dime. A free trip home? Why not! This time, the timing was especially convenient because […]
It’s the middle of peach season, and China has some of the juiciest and sweetest peaches in the world. Here, they are called 水蜜桃 (shui mi tao), or “water honey peaches.” As a peach lover, I find them to be irresistible, but a traumatic experience a couple of years ago has deterred me from messing […]
Weather: Everyone experiences it. In addition to our humanity and our egos, it is a common denominator that binds us together. But we also experience it differently. In the case of extremely large hail, we in the United States might compare the size of hailstones to, say, golf balls, as this recent Gawker article did: […]
Do you ever get tired of hearing about those South China Sea disputes between China on the one hand and basically every other country in Southeast Asia on the other? Do you ever just want to know who’s right and who’s not? Well, wonder no more: China has drawn a new map of China, in […]
The World Cup has begun, and my mind has been consumed by soccer. So, in that respect, I direct you to an excellent story in the Economist about the sport and how it is followed/played less religiously in the four biggest countries in the world (by population) than elsewhere. On this front, the United States […]