A 27-kilometer ride with Eva through Pudong. Shanghai has these places if you look for them, and if you choose to escape the massive city center. Finished with some sweet melons!
This is Shanghai as well
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Going back with nothing to say
I’m going to meet a lot of family and friends in the Netherlands in June. I know they’ll all ask how China is, but I find it really hard to answer anything. “What is China like?” is impossible to answer. It’s such a big area, and actually, I’ve mainly only been in Shanghai and the […]
Lakeside in Suzhou
Seventy kilometers in your leg, the salt on your skin, cheap peanuts from a convenience store. Some of these things I don’t think AI can replace. The outdoor advertising here hits different than in the city. (Pretty sure CurtExplores was here before, we keep going to the same places despite never having met […]
Long-necked chicken
We’re in a restaurant known for its fried potato chips/cookie things. (Oily but good!) One customer is having a jest with the owner. Both ladies of around the same age. The customer ordered a quarter of a chicken that comes served in chops, but shows her plate: “So much neck! There’s no meat on that! […]
Words waiting to be spoken, in Zhelin
A shushu grabs my bag, tries to stop me: “Where are you from?” I’ve no idea where this is going, but I say I’m from the Netherlands, to which the man replies: “Oh, bordering Germany and Belgium. 40,000 square kilometers.” I admit to him that don’t even know that last part. (Later I google it: […]
‘Sea Salt’, near the sea
The city Haiyan (海盐: literally Sea Salt). Kids are playing in the mud, trying to catch tiny crabs, and fishers (men & women) are reeling in their nets.
Sweaty Shaoxing
32 degrees and the heat is soaked up by the stone roads and stone houses, and ultimately our bodies. It’s sweaty Shaoxing. We head to 八字桥 (Character Eight Bridge), because it looks like the character ‘Eight’ (八). Nearby is the St. Joseph’s Church (八字桥圣若瑟堂), built in 1871 but today mostly used for photos & basketball. […]
Away from the cities, underneath the Milky Way
We’re somewhere in between Shengzhou (嵊州) and Yuyao (余姚). The hills are dotted with 枫叶: red maple trees. We make our way to the hills of the Fuzhi Mountain (覆卮山), with its terraced rice fields. One part of the valley is an old glacier, and it’s a thing to climb the rocks, even though the […]
The path we would have never walked
We’re in Anshan Village (安山村), a two hours drive south of Shaoxing (绍兴) in Zhejiang. There’s an old walking path here (安山古道) here that’ll soon be flooded by the placement of a dam — so a colleague advised me to walk it, now there’s still the chance. Like all paths in China with the moniker […]
Betwixt and Between review
It’s the story of Margaret Sun, who was born in Shanghai in 1935 and lived through the madness of the cultural revolution, mainly in Xinjiang — China’s new frontier. And while ordinary people in extraordinary times will have fantastic stories, this isn’t a fantastic book. And I appreciate the positive and stoic attitude held by […]