We’re in Fengyi (丰义村) this weekend. It’s a tiny village with just over 600 people — trying to get tourism going. It has all the ingredients for it. There’s a coffee place, a noodle restaurant, an ‘I Love Fengyi’ sign, and fake Dutch windmills around a mount that is in between a hill and a […]

Here’s a place I visited before: West Gate (西门) in Shanghai’s Jiading district (嘉定). Two years ago, I walked fifty meters from here, oblivious to this once-lively alley. It’s something-something about ‘you can’t step in the same river twice’. As you live in Shanghai and learn the language, you grow less reliant on Google or […]

Written: August 2022 — Updated: August 2024 Open any history book or article about Shanghai and you’ll probably read something condescending along the lines of “Shanghai was a backwater fishing village until the foreigners came in the 19th century.” And it evokes a visual image of fishermen on the banks of an empty yet huge […]

Before departure, we had read about Cambodia’s mind-blowing temples and mystical sunrises, beaches with pristine sands and crystal-clear waters. Superlatives piled onto adverbs. But we also read about how dangerous the traffic would be. That even crossing the street would be difficult. Pickpocketing and bag snatching is common. Bus operators sell more tickets than they […]

Visited Luodian Town (罗店镇) today, after a tip from Ash. It’s super deep in Baoshan, beyond the Outer Ring Road, beyond some green patches, close to Taicang (太仓). It’s so far out that it doesn’t feel like Shanghai at all. The village is spacious and has lots of trees around the roads, apart from the […]

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 […]