One last moon cake post..a slightly edited reprise of something I wrote a few years back: Today is Zhong Qiu Jie, (lit. Mid-Autumn Festival) in China. In colloquial terms, it’s called the Moon Festival, because it’s celebration coincides with the full moon. Much like Thanksgiving in American culture, Moon Festival is a time when people […]
Moon Cakes or Donkey Meat?
On Thursday, Ms. B, one of the Chinese staff in our office got a phone call asking her to go to the main gate of the school to receive a delivery of gifts for Mid-Autumn Festival. The caller was a representative from the printing company we worked with this past summer. “Bring a large cart […]
Memorial Cookies
As we were milling around the old Orthodox Church in Harbin on Sunday, an older Chinese woman came out of the church with a small bag of cookies in her hand. She came over to where we were standing and offered some to us. “It’s been12 years since our last priest passed away,” she said. […]
Living Well
Marilyn Gardner, who I knew as a kid growing up in Pakistan has a wonderful blog called Communicating Across Boundaries. This week I wrote a guest post for her called Living Well Where You Don’t Belong, in which I give 8 tips for doing just that. Here they are in bullet point form, but please […]
A Russian Bell in Harbin
We spotted the bell in the tower from the street on Saturday as we walked around the church. It was locked up tight and looked like it had been locked up tight for decades. We trained our telephoto lenses on the bell, snapping at a distance, figuring that was as close as we were likely […]
Back-packing with Mom
I spotted this darling mom and her baby on the streets of Yichang, Hebei in March 2012. Too cute for words.