Search ‘massage’ on Google and you’ll find pictures of beautifully relaxed people. Massaging, as a verb, means ‘to treat flatteringly’. But the Western notion of massage is limited. Chinese massage is different, and its name (按摩Ànmó) more honest: press stroke. We went to a Chinese spa for the latter, but I still had the former […]
This morning in Historic Shanghai’s WeChat group I saw a photo from 1995 with People’s Square and the Shanghai Museum being constructed. When I see those photos I feel sad I wasn’t in Shanghai back then, thinking it would have been amazing (yet now impossible) to walk through those alleys now-gone, to talk to people […]
In Amsterdam’s busiest shopping street is a big wooden door that opens into a corridor which leads into a church. Few shoppers notice the door, let alone pass it. But the transition is wonderful: you go from a crowded street, a cacophony, into the silence of a church, and leave the shopping street behind, if […]
It’s a fair price to pay to live in Shanghai, but being so far from the Netherlands makes me long for it a lot. The feeling arrives suddenly. I thought I’d be immune to it but no. I walk through familiar streets in Google Street View, I look back at last year’s pictures, and I […]
‘Old Captain Bar’ (老船长) at 168 Gaoyang Lu in Hongkou is my kind of sad place. It has shiny brewing tanks in its interior, five eager staff in turquoise jackets and a singer doing hits from the 90’s and 00’s, but not too loud, so you can still talk. The television shows figure skating – […]
I decided to enter this art deco building at 505 Dong Changzhi Lu, as it seemed totally deserted when I entered. Inside I discovered it to be be an old seamen’s hospital, built by colonialists in 1934. As I explored more inwards — and just as I sent a photo to my friend — I […]
(Originally posted on Seventy-Magazine.) I’d like to give an insight on China’s ‘silver generation’, because while China’s younger generations are often in the spotlight, its senior citizens are largely ignored — despite its 150 million ‘members’ having a combined annual income of around 300-400 billion RMB. But instead of some board generalisations, here’s a slice of life […]
This vinyl record made it to Shanghai and that’s a miracle. It makes me wonder about how this music was composed around 250 years ago in a candle-lit room in Germany, and played over 60 years ago by an Englishman visiting a small city in post-war Netherlands. I wonder about the church that was built […]
I’ve now taken two months of Mandarin classes, and last week our teacher taught us the words for cat (māo) and dog (gǒu) — and as a sort of fun extracurricular, she also explained the sounds they make: “miaow” and “wang” — or rather; how those sounds are perceived by Chinese. In the Netherlands, a […]
