Visited Luodian Town (罗店镇) today, after a tip from Ash. It’s super deep in Baoshan, beyond the Outer Ring Road, beyond some green patches, close to Taicang (太仓). It’s so far out that it doesn’t feel like Shanghai at all. The village is spacious and has lots of trees around the roads, apart from the […]
Zhuqiao Village (祝桥镇) in Shanghai. It’s scorching hot. I bought a 2.7 RMB icecream from Mixue (蜜雪冰城) and it was dripping down my wrist within a minute. Eva said it looks here like she remembers her childhood. The buildings off the main road are smaller, but the streets are cozy. There’s a dentist (牙科) and […]
Outskirts of Shanghai (上海三甲港海). It’s a dead-end street and planes fly over our heads to land on Pudong Airport. We’ve climbed across barbed wire and down the sea dike to mudbanks, full of tiny crabs (螃蜞). Some fishermen stand on the dike and take in the view. We tell them how they can get down: […]
Every day I cycle to work from Chuansha (川沙) through Tangzhen (唐镇) to Zhangjiang (张江), a 7-kilometer ride. And in between Tangzhen and Zhangjiang, I cross the Shanghai Outer Ring Road (外环高速公路). It’s currently under construction, with a new additional, elevated road being built on top of it — which makes the border even more […]
Feels like another milestone in my now six-year-long Chinese learning journey: Two days of management meetings, all Mandarin. I could follow everything well, just had to check a few words in Pleco. I did survive mainly on coffee and felt my brains were pretty fried, but that was everyone’s sentiment really. This is West Lake, […]
After walking through the cozy but crowded University Road (大学路), my favorite thing to do is to climb to the top of Jiangwan Stadium. The stadium is a bowl, that also keeps the noise out, and it’s as if you enter a silent bubble. (Luckily it’s used for sports again.) I’ve been coming to this […]
We’re in Zhuanghang (庄行) for its 伏羊Fúyáng Festival. I don’t know whether the 羊 here stands for sheep or goat (the Chinese word does not distinguish between the two), so I ask the chef. “No idea”, he says and yells for the owner. I even show him a picture of both a sheep and a […]
Chuansha (川沙) in the morning, before the heat strikes. Any calories I burned off while cycling, I probably more than compensated with this single oily scallion pancake (葱油饼).
China is extremely safe and full of cameras everywhere — but the irony is that still people break the rules all the time. Some of these are laws, but most are just rules or norms. For example, some people (and I emphasize: some) are loud in the very early morning, at like 6 o’clock. Others, […]
I rarely share anything about my daily working life here. It’s almost like a double life I live. (Although I did share about working in Zhangjiang (张江) before.) But here’s perhaps something cool to share; how Pimax’s electronics are made, and for that matter, many of the world’s stuff. Last Tuesday, with a colleague, I […]