Notes on the First Anniversary of my 7th Blog
April 18, 2011

Notes on the First Anniversary of my 7th Blog

Origins I started this blog near the end of last April, impulsively, after I read the words ‘ephemera and detritus’ in a comment on a blog I’ve long since lost track of.  Possibly from Salon’s now defunct Broadsheet. Rather than just noting it down and …

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Blue Skies, Fake Britain and Imaginary Friends: It Gets Better (For Now)
March 30, 2011

Blue Skies, Fake Britain and Imaginary Friends: It Gets Better (For Now)

Four days ago, I was quite dissatisfied with Shanghai and with living abroad in general. I wanted to go home to Canada, to go live in the forest and bake bread and raise goats and make really awesome goat cheese and to say, quite pleasantly, …

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Notes on Genocidal Tourism in Cambodia
February 27, 2011

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 …

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How much would YOU pay to be bit by a rabid monkey: More good times in Phnom Penh
February 8, 2011

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 …

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Shouldn’t it be…harder?: On Travelling in Comfort
February 7, 2011

Shouldn’t it be…harder?: On Travelling in Comfort

Let me introduce you to a few key examples of how I have traveled in the past. Let’s start at the beginning, when I was barely 20 years old. In 1994, I spent two months sleeping on my friend’s sofa in a small flat above …

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Chinese New Year II: Explosions, Bunnies, Shuttered Doors
February 3, 2011

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 …

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Chinese New Year in Shanghai: Bunnies Gone Wild
February 2, 2011

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 …

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Meat and Mops- My Parents’ Journey to Qibao
January 22, 2011

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 …

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A Series of Partially Related Photos: Walking With my Parents in Shanghai
January 10, 2011

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 …

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Christmas Day Odyssey in Shanghai: A Quest for Doug’s Destiny
December 25, 2010

Christmas Day Odyssey in Shanghai: A Quest for Doug’s Destiny

So remember how I said my next post was going to be all about the Christmas Party at the tea house, and how it would contain all my much-better camera photos rather than my crappy, grainy phone photos? Yeah. I lied. My bad. Unfortunately, we …

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A Fine Excuse To Eat: The University Christmas Party (Part 1)
December 25, 2010

A Fine Excuse To Eat: The University Christmas Party (Part 1)

I think I have two narratives here so I’m pre-emptively dividing them up into two posts. The taxonomical sorting process is based on two things: crappy phone camera vs. real camera, and food vs. performance and festivities. It’s Christmas morning and we’re heading out soon …

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Nihilism in Shanghai: Everything Dies. Everything.
December 22, 2010

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 …

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