I saw this message from Curt about how difficult it is to love Shanghai, and there’s some truth in that. I’ve now lived here for over seven years, and I think most tourist attractions are boring, or I have grown out of them. Or maybe Shanghai is too big a city to love. But below […]

On Xiaohongshu, I searched for village names in the area where we live on Xiaoshongshu and found an old decaying house from the Qing Dynasty that caught my eye — just seven kilometers away! The uploader mentioned that the building — named the Gulu Guandi Temple (顾路关帝庙) — was built in 1910, to be used […]

I’m trying to cancel my China Mobile broadband subscription. I call China Mobile and I tell them I want to cancel, they say “sure, done!” One day later I get a call back: “You wanted to cancel broadband? You need to give back the router and modem back to cancel.” I learn that I can […]

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 […]