I was persuaded by some friends to take a few days off over the Golden Week holiday and accompany them on a very long bus trip down south. I wasn’t sure at first, that I wanted to spend 6 hours on a bus, but I decided that it might be fun once we got there… Read More »
I don’t know how I’ve lasted so long in Shanghai without taking a walk down QiPu Lu. It’s full of shops and countless indoor markets selling cheap and fake clothes. The markets are a maze of small stalls specialising in underwear, jeans, children’s clothes, scarves, women’s ‘fashion’ and outdoor clothes. (If an item of clothing… Read More »
What on earth are the Shanghai authorities suggesting with this warning poster? We have to be aware of suspicious gatherings (at least I think that’s what it’s supposed to say), as well as weekly underground preaching. I don’t think either of these would get past the politcal correctness police in the west but in China… Read More »
I was going for a cycle ride to the river and decided to go down Damuqiao Lu for a change. Maybe it’s a Sunday market – I certainly hadn’t noticed it before. There were lots of stalls and sheets spread out on the ground covered with old coins, jade, beads, antique (or not!) items. It’s… Read More »
I was at Fuxhou Lu today browsing the art shops in the rain. I was hungry and one of the shopkeepers said I could get some nice dumplings around the corner at the juncion of Hankou Lu. He was correct – they were brilliant and cheap. On my way back to Fuzhou Lu I spotted… Read More »
Who needs expensive stapping to hold down industrial sized rolls of steel cable when gravity will do the trick? I suppose this was the thinking behind the packing decisions of this Chinese company. Perhaps the load was only going a short distance and they didn’t deem it necessary. Luckily my taxi driver was keeping his… Read More »
I walk past this queue every morning to go to work and it seems to be getting longer. Now there are barriers for help with crowd control. The two queues stretch right down HuaiHai Lu almost to Chengdu Lu and this morning the pavement was made even more perilous by a hanful of entrepreneurial women… Read More »
I have been to Nanchang before – passed through is on the slow train to Ganzhou and didn’t like what I saw – lots of greyness, dirty streets, rain and low visibility. Mind you, I didn’t actually leave the railway station so my opinion of the place was formed from that limited viewpoint. However, I… Read More »
I was leafing through a geography IGCSE course book when I sensed a problem with the book. They are all photocopies here so it is not uncommon to find pages missing or printed upside down. My fingers felt one of the pages was a lot thicker than the others and I thought two pages had… Read More »
There’s no such thing as a field studies centre in China. Well, that’s what the schools around here are telling me. That’s why I have spent three months trying to persuade a farm on an island in the Yangtze, that they should hand their brand new facility over to me to create one. The owners… Read More »