Strolling near Jinqiao (金桥镇). Pretty sure more people lived here, but they got pushed out by the highway. Ayi is busy planting corn, with more vitality than most people in the office. A shifu is heating some water. (License plate showed they’re from Anhui.) “Forbidden to swim”
I saw this message from Curt about how difficult it is to love Shanghai, and there’s some truth in that. Maybe it’s too big a city to love, and I just love some specific locations of Shanghai. Let me have a go. Ye Garden (叶家花园), a ~100-year-old park in Yangpu, hidden behind a hospital. Usually […]
I once read the poetic line: “If you like the sea, come to Shanghai and never look at it” Well, today we drove Nanhui New Town Beach (南汇新城海滩) all in the southeast of Shanghai in Lingang (临港). Not sure if this is worthy of the ‘beach’ moniker though. Concrete blocks protect the land against the […]
It’s the first good weather weekend without covid restrictions, in more than a year. The parks and streets of Yangzhou (扬州) fill with people. Dongguan Street (东关街) is 1146 meters long, filled with the smell of fried food from both sides and people everywhere. The cooking installations burst out of homes and onto the streets. […]
In the summer of 2018, I moved to Shanghai and back then I only planned to stay maybe two years in China, so I didn’t consider it necessary to learn Chinese. In Shanghai, it’s OK to get by without speaking Mandarin. You either point at pictures or show the translated sentence on your phone. For […]