I’m really excited to be working with the CN Reviews team, joining Elliot Ng, David Feng, Min Guo and Kai Pan. CNReviews is a thoughtful discussion on tech, travel, trends, the China blogosphere, and the crazy adventures when East meets West. My first article, Wang Ba: Gaming in a Strange Land, just went up.
I can’t […]

I was tutoring a teenage student last night, and we did a reading about finding jobs in America. The passage talked about looking in the paper to find a new, and I mentioned that it’s a bit out-of-date, and people our age use the internet much more than the newspaper classified.
My teenage student gave me […]

I’ve hit a frustrating plateau with my Chinese-speaking. When I speak, I give the tones a good shot, and hope for the best. If I can’t get the tone of “glass” right, hopefully the rest of the sentence, usually “I’d like one of beer” will make my meaning clear. Unfortunately, my vocab’s hitting a point […]

Stick went out to get that typical American gift, a dozen red roses, but in China nothing is mundane. The roses came with glitter, tinsel, rose-printed cellophane, magenta tissue paper, and purple curling ribbon. Did you ever see that part of Love Actually, when Mr. Bean wraps up the Christmas necklace? Like that but with […]

Stick and I went exploring down the Russian street between the Ritan Park Jenny Lou’s and The Place. It’s at the eastern end of Ritan Bei Lu, where it meets Dongdaqiao Lu. The last time I was at The Place, it was all done up for Christmas. I thought it was fairy-light overload then, but […]

I noticed a spike in my blog traffic after my post on our new shower, it turns out I’m getting a lot of hits from British DIY sites and home-improvement message boards… I don’t know what that says about plumbing in the UK.
Google Analytics shows where these hits are coming from, and I recognize London, […]

Looks like the blue background makes people want to comment. Thanks! Great to hear from you! Except for the one guy who keeps telling me how to buy discount drugs from Canadian pharmacies, I don’t think he realizes I haven’t got those parts. Moving on.
If you’re reading this in a feedreader (ie if you’re in […]

I got a pack of Hello Kitty reward stickers at the supermarket to give to my students. (I have one class with three girls called Kitty, and that makes saying “Hello, Kitty!” hilarious.) It was an assortment of stickers, with normal ones like Nice Work, Well Done and Super!, but there were also some unusual […]

I thought that I was familiar with the demo class as a shady recruitment policy, but my current school’s plan for a demo class might actually be a record for sketchy Chinese ESL policies. Basically, the parents are going to be invited to watch a class in December. The reason we know about it now, […]

Stick and I went to the Capital Museum to see the Treasures From The Louvre: Art From Ancient Greece exhibit. Stick and I are both classicists so we were really excited to go. It was great to see statues and vases showing stories we could “read” instead of seeing some guy… with a dragon… […]