According to official Chinese government regulations, if a city is located south of the Yangtze River it is considered tropical and therefore does not need to be heated in winter. Shanghai is located about one millimeter south of the Yangtze River, as can be seen …
Part 1 is here and part 2 is here. It’s a beautiful day today. Sun is shining, skies are blue. Scarves are too hot, a coat is nearly too much. Sunglasses are needed. Birds are singing, crowds thronging, babies squatting with split trousers, dogs in …
For Part 1, go here This blog was left negligently unattended for much of November whilst I diverted myself and my energies with that blasted novella about goats and monsters and such. However, that doesn’t mean I neglected to use the camera on my phone. …
First of all, I finished that novel(la): So yes, yes I did write that blasted thing. At work, my stack of writing to mark grew to unfathomable heights (sorry kids!) and my mornings and nights and weekends were spent trying to squeeze out …
So I am knee deep in Nanowrimo, or perhaps only shin deep, as I am not sure 15,059 words out of 50,000 can count as a knee. I’m also still sicketty sick sick, which has made me a barking machine. This means I’m not posting …
I really do hate crowds. Crowds make me want to hit people or queue jump just to escape from the queue (because in China, some queues are so vast and switchbacky that to get out you have to go forward). I don’t like noise. …
It was a few hours after we got the news that our flight to Chengdu was to be delayed from noon until night that I got the call from the techie at the apple store. We were already at the airport, trying to kill time …
So in one fell swoop, I killed both of my computers over the course of one weekend. The newer one, the MacBook Pro I got back in Canada while freelancing for some St. Louis IT Companies in February, is technically still in a coma at …
One of the more precarious aspects about living abroad has been finding clothes to cover my body. In Turkey, I discovered that my arms, legs and torso were significantly longer than the average Turk of my hip-waist measurements so all my shirt cuffs ended …
In Istanbul, at the last flat I lived in before we left Turkey in 2008, my upstairs neighbour- a middle-aged woman in a house dress and slippers- used to ring my doorbell repeatedly at all hours. If I was in the shower, she’d keep ringing …
In the interest of creating mental escape routes for the rainy season, I’m starting a new category exclusively for cafes in Shanghai to duck into out of the rain. Since I’m off til mid-September (mostly- I do have exams and papers to mark this week) …
The hills are so famous that they are on the 20rmb note. Looking closely at a 20rmb note, I failed to see the armies of uniformed tour groups and the clusters of hotels and the endless checkpoints of touts and vendors surrounding the hills. …
