I get into the taxi, as the driver looks at his phone to see the route. Driver: “What?! A six-kilometer drive, I only get 13 RMB?!” He looks over to me in the back seat. Driver: “How much do you pay? What does it say on the app?” Me: “16 RMB it says.” Driver: “Yesterday […]
After a dinner in rural Zhejiang, we walked to our guesthouse and we looked at the stars. And when you haven’t consciously seen the stars for over a year, well, — they look amazing. But in Shanghai, stars are largely invisible, drowned out by the light the city produces. For all of Shanghai’s amenities, it’s […]
It’s a cold Saturday morning in January and my body is tired from a two-week business trip, but my mind yearns for this. I park the car at Lake Meadow. Las Vegas does not make me appreciate humanity in the slightest, with its pursuit of idle pleasures. It’s a city made for tourists, not residents. […]
A bike ride is always an adventure. If you keep your eyes open and are free to take any path you want, you’ll always discover new things. So today, I saw chicks, little alleys under construction, and an alley with rickety houses that are beyond repair, yet still have people living in them.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is one of my favorite books, having now gone through these pages three times. It’s very American in the way that it’s about competition, and the alien invasion is a both an excuse and a metaphor to put winning above anything else. It’s also this type of glorification of […]
Initially, I was a big fan of Strava (an app to record your workouts), as it’s one of the few social apps used by both friends in China and the Netherlands — and it also felt like an extra push to cycle a bit more. But I quickly found out I was turning into exactly […]
After finishing moving and unpacking the boxes, I took a short walk outside the new area — on the edge of Tangzhen (唐镇) and Heqing (合庆). And I need to sometimes remind myself of what an adventure this life is, having grown up in a small city in the Netherlands to now live in China […]
I think it was a talk from Simon Aliband on how he arrived in Shanghai in the 80s, on a summer night sitting in a bus driving to his university dorms, through the dark city. After sunset, the people of Shanghai would leave their houses to cool down in the dark outdoor air, and he […]
Even if you already know the storyline of the Iliad and what’s about to happen, ‘A Song of Achilles’ still makes for a gripping read. The story starts slow but it’s an amazingly detailed world you enter. The tension drops in the middle, but the pace picks up near the end, and I couldn’t put […]
I ordered a moving van (货啦啦) and a couple from Shandong showed up. Because these drivers spend the full day in the van, I figured she was just accompanying her husband for his work, to be together the whole day. But then she explained his back is bad. So the guy helped with things like […]
