I just came back from a frigid, yet incredible weekend in Harbin, where I flew to visit the ice and snow festival. Harbin is a must-do in the winter in China. The Ice Festival is Disneyland meets Elsa’s castle from…
How to do Thanksgiving in Shanghai
It’s not Thanksgiving in China until you bring the turkey legs you bought online to the butcher shop across the street, because they do not fit in the slow-cooker. It’s not really Thanksgiving until the lady in the butcher shop…
How to get to the DMZ (and get back safely)
There are two security checkpoints at the DMZ. We take out our passports and an armed guard verifies them against the passport numbers we provided at the start of the morning. He gives a salute to our van driver, who…
Cold beer and Korean BBQ
I get off the train of Hongkik University and the first thing I notice is how good it smells. Seriously, there’s an entire two block stretch that smells like sweet buttermilk biscuits, Cajun fries, and fried chicken. There’s a small…
Crawfish boils aka how to trick people into thinking you’re glistening, not sweating
The roar of the cicadas in the summer is deafening. The past few weeks have been deafening, sweltering, and muggy. Seriously, Shanghai is a stifling oven cracked all the way up to broil. Actually, no, not an oven. That’s not…
Shanghai-Tested: My first ‘Chinese’ haircut
The hairstylist put down the bleach and took out a jar of brown dye. That’s when I realized something had gone awry. As part of my recent deep-dive into embracing China local life, I took the plunge and did something I had never done before…
A morning commute in Shanghai
My scooter slips. I skid into a crack on the pavement and veer sharply to the left. The man on a motorbike to my left narrowly avoids me and squeezes past, unfazed. The car behind us screeches to a…
Spanish paella, LobsterFest 2017, and other reasons to celebrate Spring
I had planned to write about how the miserable of the past week, but instead I’m writing about the beautiful. I’m writing about the beautiful, because life in Shanghai has reached peak levels of the exhausting and the absurd, and when things…
The most beautiful things about Florence
I feel like the word breathtaking is overrated. We use it so much that when something truly takes our breath away – and I mean with that sharp intake of breath and an utter loss for words, I completely lack the vocabulary to…
The courage to eat with a spoon
Learning to use chopsticks in China is easy. Learning when not to use them is hard. Dinner in Shanghai – my home for the past two years – is rarely eaten alone. A dinner is the sort of grand occasion…
Leaving WordPress
I’ve done it. I’m self-hosting my blog! This feels like a big step, because Skipping Customs (first called Pasta Republic) is something I started over three years ago and over the three years it’s become a place where I’ve been able to openly…
I got stung by a jellyfish in Malaysia
twelve mai tais Happy Hour is from 11am to 5pm and it just seems irresponsible not to order four at once. Mai Tais in hand, we walk up and down wet sand part of the white beach. We each take…