With all the shops closed and most of my friends out of town, there’s little use kicking around Kunming during the holiday. I’ll be setting off on a bike trip this afternoon that will take me to Hekou, a city on the China/Vietnam border. I’ll be back Saturday night and photos and trip descriptions will [...]
- The same people who agitate for “Free T!bet” in the West- oblivious to the Dalai Lama’s renunciation of any claim to independence- wouldn’t last for longer than a week if they actually, you know, had to live there. -T!bet is beautiful. The people are nice, and simple, and devout, and charmingly rugged. They’re also [...]
A few months ago James Fallows wrote a piece for The Atlantic claiming that China’s ham-handed efforts to repress dissent typically backfired in the form of bad PR. I too have always thought that China is a far more open and vibrant country than is portrayed in the media, which to a certain extent is [...]
There’s few things I love more than completely arbitrary rankings intended to spur argument. Someone, bless his cotton socks, has ranked Beatles songs- all 185 of them- from best to worst. This is like crack for me. The list itself isn’t too bad, though the reviewer seems to like McCartney-penned ballads a bit more than [...]
I have a cleaning lady who is professional, reliable, and sweet. The other day, though, she got on my nerves by gleefully pointing out how I got ripped off when buying furniture at the second-hand market. At the second-hand market, of course, all prices are negotiable. I’m not a terrible negotiator, but eventually my patience [...]
The other morning I was awoken by a rooster crowing. At first I suspected that it was a cell-phone alarm clock, but the crows were too irregular for that to be the case. Awhile later, while sitting on my balcony, I realized that there was an actual rooster living in one of the apartments beneath [...]
Apologies, apologies- I’ve been shamefully neglectful of this blog in the past two weeks. My primary excuse has been moving- last week I moved into a new apartment after two years of living on the 8th floor of an old-fashioned walk-up near the university. My new place, located next to the northern train station, is [...]
1. You bring beers to business meetings- in the middle of the afternoon. 2. You complain when you have to pay more than 8 yuan for a Tsingtao at a bar 3. You think the notion of working more than 20 hours per week is crazy 4. You have heated discussions about which cafe serves [...]
Every time I go back to the US, about once a year or so, I realize how much further I’m out of the loop. One way is in money; a lot of my old friends are doing well financially. About a year ago, I went to dinner with three friends from high school, two of [...]
Since graduating from college in 2004, the vast majority of writing that I’ve done–excluding e-mails–has been in this and other blogs. Overall, I’ve probably written enough words to fill a couple of books, an amazing fact when considering that I’ve seldom spent more than a half-hour composing any individual entry. In August of last year, [...]