Working on the website now. Blog coming up on this page so why not start with a blog entry? I’m also working on a neat gallery and an e-mail form for the contact page. I’ve chosen a vertical layout of the website. Normally I wouldn’t do that because it leaves little space for a gallery (which will probably the most important part of my website), but I’m working on a system that will place the gallery “on top” of my site anyway. I like the layout a lot because I think it’s uncommon and trendy, but most of all, it works on every screen, regardless the size. That’s the neat thing about my gallery as well, it automatically adjusts to the dimensions of your screen, until the file size is reached.
In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China? Neither question is […]
It’s a Saturday morning, and we’re in a taxi on the way to the airport. My clothes cling to my body and already reek of sweat, and that’s even before our 12-hour flight has started. Today I woke up at 5:30 to get up early and throw away the last furniture and items we used […]
Learning Chinese, or any language, makes you more aware of language in general. And one thing that surprised me is that, despite Mandarin being so different from my mother tongue (Dutch), both languages reach for the same units when weighing things: the kilogram (公斤, gōngjīn) and the half-kilogram (斤, jīn). It’s a small thing, but […]
There are multiple ways to define Shanghai. There’s the more modern version, with beautiful lanes full of expensive yoga studios or artisan coffee shops, lined with the London Plane Tree (法国梧桐) and the Wukang Mansion (武康大楼), and renovated parks like the North Bund (北外滩) and West Bund (西岸). There’s also the Shanghai as the international […]
