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 […]

My favorite place in Shanghai. Every visit feels spiritual. We all come to watch the river, to cool down our bodies. Most of the people here are migrant workers, but underneath the stars, we’re all the same, and the view is identical for everyone. (Near 向阳村.) I saw another cyclist sitting down, a young guy […]

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).

Yesterday I finally got to reading Iron & Silk, about Mark Salzman teaching English in Changsha (长沙) in the early 80s. And even though Salzman seems like a great guy, he does not make for a great writer, and to me, his book feels more like a bundle of anecdotes rather than literature. This isn’t […]

This book is a memoir of an English teacher in China, so a parallel to Peter Hessler is easily made. Mark Salzman’s book could have been the more interesting one, because he lived in China in the early 80s. Both Iron & Silk and River Town consist of loose stories, but Hessler binds them together […]