PVG to AMS flight, another movie: Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (春江水暖) from 2019 — shot in Hangzhu’s Fuyang district (富阳区). A slow but deep film that packs so much about a changing China and culture. Family, money, marriage, housing prices, the rising economy, taking care of elders.

My phone’s keyboard can auto-suggest names like Amsterdam or Canberra, and names like Spotify or Maserati — but it does not know nor auto-complete the name Chuzhou, despite four million people living here. Many Chinese cities are like that. They exist and they’re huge — multi-million populations — but auto-correct (as well as many people) […]

After attending the world’s biggest tech event, it’s nice to go to a place without any cell phone signal: Calico Basin of the Red Rock Canyon, near Las Vegas. ‘No cell phone signal’ isn’t a metaphor or anything. Having my Uber drop me off here wasn’t an issue, but when I finished the trail, I […]

Another long flight, watched Chungking Express (重庆森林) from my laptop. A dreamy movie about loneliness and love — while I’m half the world away from mine, makes me miss her even more. 10/10 cinematography, every shot is an artwork.

We also stumbled on the Zhejiang Museum of Natural History (浙江自然博物馆) in Anji (安吉), expecting some tiny dusty museum in the middle of nowhere — the way rural things often are. (Anji is a county-level city that belongs to Huzhou (湖州) which is a Tier 3 city.) But no, this museum is massive, with a […]

I visited a shopping mall downtown for the first time in like half a year, and I felt like so overwhelmed. The noise coming from stores, from greeters in front of stores, people laughing, people yelling into the phone or yelling for their kids. You queue to leave the highway, queue to enter the parking […]

炸米花 (puffed rice) made on the street in Chuansha (川沙). Bring your own oil, sesame, and rice or corn, and put your bag in the queue. Great taste, especially when still warm. Crunchy and a tiny bit sweet. When the rice is almost ready, the pot-thingy opens with a big bang. Eva: “When we were […]

We’re eating our Christmas meal, two fish and four hairy crabs. Eva: “When I was young and some families married, we’d go to a restaurant, no hotel, and if they served crab, well such a family was really rich. But eating crab is too slow, takes too much time, so we first ate all the […]

Two out of three trees in Shanghai are London plane trees. City planners call it a supertree. Its secret is its peculiar camouflage-patterned bark, which peels off in quick succession, allowing the tree to ‘clean’ itself from pollution. As a result, it has a high tolerance to pests and diseases, and captures smog and carbon […]

I’ve now been working in Shanghai for over 5 years, and 14 months in a Chinese company using Mandarin as the main working language. So here I list the lessons I took from the past year — many things I should have done better, or things I’ve seen happen in other companies through stories from […]

Outside the office, we see lots of people walking with big boxes of toys and go to see what’s happening. Three ‘cowboys’ are standing next to a pile of stuff like fake Legos, Barbies, and bikes, yelling if you register for a free creditcard you can pick a box, even a bike! Lots of people […]

China-Europe Street in Shanghai (中欧街). Everything is deserted apart from a Starbucks, and a couple having their wedding pics taken. The storefronts of Hermes, Prada, Chanel, and Gucci are fake. Outside are dozens of food stands though, more popular at night. This place would appear in some kind of fever dream. The statues, they’re of […]