Job Satisfaction
While having lunch (or was it cocktails? Yes! Cocktails!) with my friend Jo in Tibet northern Yunnan the other day, I suddenly realised that few people in the world has less job satisfaction than me. →
Learn Cantonese in 2016
No… that can’t be three years ago? But the calendar says it is. It’s just that it feels like a few weeks since we stood outside the railway station in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province, →
Lao Wai
The new year celebrations were hard for everyone this year, even man-sized teddies. This sad corpse was lying outside my hotel in Kunming, I’m guessing thrown angrily away by some girl who had expected diamonds →
Opulent Chair Sitting – Almost!
If there’s one thing I missed during this Christmas and New Year’s Yunnan Extravaganza, it was the chance to do some serious Opulent Chair (or Sofa)- Sitting. How strange; Guangdong province is replete with ultra-opulent →
Well and Truly 2016
It’s well and truly next year! First I thought, I can’t wait for 2015 to be over, but then I stopped myself. The faster next year comes, the sooner I’ll be in the grave. So →
Dali: Where Christmas is not Only Santa
Jesus hovering over the Great Wall? Why not. Jesus is everywhere so why not the Great Wall? It just looked so incongruous to see the cross in the middle of Dali’s old city as we →
On the Spray to Shenzhen
Last week my glorious sister Beate came to spend Christmas in Hong Kong which she did and how. But no trip to Hong Kong is complete without a trip to Shenzhen. Is it? No, it →
Ingredients: Buy Foodstuffs in Cantonese
Today I wanted to write a well-researched rant about Cantonese NOT being a dialect, a kind of sub-division, an inferior sub-division, of Mandarin. But I have to cook for 13 in a couple of hours, →
Children Outside Society
Last night I shared a taxi from Tung Chung – oh how it pains me to spell it that way when it’s pronounced DUNG Chung – with a boy and his domestic helper. I noticed →
Microaggression and Macro-Self-Contradiction
Yesterday I wrote about a guide to recognise white-to-coloured racism or “microaggression,[] the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional(my italics), that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to →