Thursday 28th of September, off work and leaving the house at 18:43: The holiday starts! Train tickets are all sold out, so first leg of the trip is 100 km cycling to Suzhou through the night. Crossing the river. Oh Shanghai, you’re such a great city to arrive in, and such a great city […]
125km ride in drizzle today, one unwary moment, and my front wheel slipped. Scratched ankle, knee, hip & elbow. Across the road sat a shushu in his tiny wooden chair, he saw me go down but not a single reaction — not even a raised eyebrow. In the convenience store next to this I was […]
This was a pure coincidence but near Haining (海宁) we went to the riverside & saw people waiting. A shushu said the tide is coming in. Ten mins later we saw the Qiantang River colliding with the tide from the East China Sea. Sure there’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere. The 观潮-crowd: And […]
Friend: “One of my relatives owns a steel factory in Zhoushan. He earns so much money, he sells that stuff to companies abroad, but for his staff, it’s dangerous work. Sometimes one of his employees dies, they just give the family 200万 RMB and let them shut up. If they take the money, they cannot […]
Shops! Food! Animals! All of it in and around ‘Little Shanghai Pedestrian Street’ (小上海步行街), in Zhoupu (周浦镇). One ‘layer’ outside of the street you’ll find cheap hotels and family-owned businesses, like clothing, make-up, and tattoo parlors. One more layer out and it’s an old suburb, absorbed into the shopping area. The houses are so close […]
I moved to China in 2018 and have integrated pretty well, I think? But especially the 90s and 00s are a mystery to me, while my Chinese friends & colleagues did live through that period, grew up in it, shaped by it (as I was by the 90s and 00s in the Netherlands). It’s very […]
Cycled to Tongli and stopped by the ruins of an old bunker/tower. Built by the Japanese during WW2 to have a good look at the rail- and waterway. Inside the bunkers, someone graffitied the words 肾 (kidney) and 根治 (cure) — I’m not sure why, not even sure if it’s metaphorical in meaning or anything […]