I’d like to issue an official apology to Charles Dickens: Charlie, I get it now. Winter in Great Britain sucks. It’s cruel, cold, and dark.
2023 Goals
When I think about things I want to accomplish in 2023, just having the freedom to make New Years resolutions is overwhelming. Seriously, this is like breathing fresh air after a year of being chased by a dark cloud of…
Un-settled
The city is pure chaos. I can smell the four-day old pork of the meat vendor mixing with the sickly sweet fried dough of the shop next door.
The one where we got trapped in Calais for 72 hours.
There are worse placed to be trapped in for 3 days. But then again.. there are many far better ones. Our forced weekend in Calais will involve a lot of mussels in white wine, the famed French seaside, and a surreal encounter with Calais’ dragon mascot
Moganshan, I love you, but we got to break up.
It’s my last time going to Moganshan before I leave China and I feel like I am putting a cork on the experience of being here for 8 years. Except I’m not corking a fine wine– I’m corking gutter oil,…
My neighbor is a rat and other things I discover during the Shanghai lockdown.
Two weeks into my 62-day Shanghai lockdown, I come to hate my second-floor neighbor. To be fair, we’re all losing it, but this guy just ratted us out to the entire 200+ person compound WeChat group. All we did was…
Hello again
It’s been a while. The other day I read some fanfiction that I wrote back in 2006 and okay, here is the thing. It wasn’t that bad. It certainly wasn’t great, or even good. But I had a few well-written…
The best and worst books of 2020 (so far)
One of the lasting effects of quarantine has been that I started to read for fun again. Over the last couple of years, I’ve completely fallen off the wagon. Then, COVID happened and when the illness started to devastate Asia…
Dianshan Lake
Last Saturday, I went to Dianshan Lake, an oasis right on the border of Shanghai and Suzhou. It was so nice to get away from the city and feel like you were in nature, and in some ways feel normal…
What it’s like to travel in China in 2020
We left Shanghai this past weekend, for the first time since arriving in March. Actually, that’s a lie. I left for a weekend in Moganshan back in May, which was a two-hour drive away into the mountains of Zhejiang. But…