One of my favorite things to do is chat with taxi drivers. Given the fact that they spend most of their lives stuck in a Beijing traffic jam, they tend to be rather chatty and jolly, especially when they discover that I can actually talk with them. I've had a lot of fun and bizarre…
Month: April 2011
Red Hats
This is my first ever guest post, written by a colleague who travelled to Chongqing last week to visit some teachers at a university. When she came back she told me about an interesting ‘civilization’ campaign the school is waging to try to improve the behavior of the students. It was such a great story…
It was Chicken! It was Chicken!
In 1999 my parents came on a 7-day tour to Beijing. They had been here a couple of times before, and even though group tours were not really their thing,they couldn't pass up a deal on offer from good old Dayton's Travel in Minneapolis: $900.00 for airfare, 6 nights in a hotel, and 2 days…
Beijing! Beijing!
Evan Osnos, a China-based Staff Writer for The New Yorker has just written a wonderful article about Beijing for the magazine Conde Nast Traveler called City of Dreams. Here's a a bit of a teaser for you: An outsider might imagine that the novel that captures China's current gilded-age mood would be set in Shanghai,…
The Family Scooter
On a glorious Spring afternoon in Shanghai last month, I spotted this family out heading out for the day. Notice the wooden stool upon which the child sits. I love this photo!
Port-a-Potties at the Wall
This is a photo of the toilets perched atop a terrace at the Mutianyu Section of the Great Wall, north of Beijing. I remember the first time I saw them– back when they were first installed in the 1990’s. I had taken some friends to the Wall and of course as we got off the…