It has always been very easy to buy travel insurance online. The difficult bit is navigating the comparison websites. I spent hour upon hour looking at travel insurance for a two week holiday to Indonesia. I wouldn’t usually bother with travel insurance, especially when going to a cheap country, but this time it was a… Read More »
I’ve been dreading the return of the cockroaches after their winter hibernation – it’s the real sign that summer has arrived in Shanghai. Still, the sight of the first one in the bathroom still freaked me out. The second one I nearly sat on – freaked me out A LOT more. It was hiding under… Read More »
I wrote a while ago about how boring Japan was and that I missed China when I was there. Every day in China, there’s some madness which makes you smile (and sometimes curse). You never know what you will see when you step out of your house. If you head into the parks, of course… Read More »
I knew when I threw away the vast majority of my outdoor clothes and equipment a few years, that I would sooner or later need them. I kept one small rucksack but all my other gear went to friends or charity shops. Now I find myself going out shopping again for my trip to Sumatra.… Read More »
I often walk past these boards on the pavement advertising apartments for rent and it astounds me that anyone on a local salary can afford to live in the French Concession at all. The first flat on the list is 9 square metres for £180. So that’s about 3 metres by 3 metres, just jut… Read More »
How often do you get to be a tourist in the city where you live? Wednesday was a lovely evening so a few of us paid 120RMB each for a 50 minute trip up and down the Huangpu river. we were the only foreigners on what I shall loosely call a cruise ship. In fact… Read More »
After today’s AS2 lesson when I had to wake Leo up 5 or 6 times and then gave up trying, I researched online about the problem with teenagers falling asleep in class and found the following. ‘Few high school students are awake enough to get much out of their first class, particularly if it starts… Read More »
Most of us have changed our air-conditioners to cool from hot air and I have sent all my winter clothes to the dry cleaners. My wardrobe is now full of the thinnest clothes and I have a new pair of sandals ready for the enslaught which is the Shanghai summer. Yesterday I decided to take… Read More »
Easter weekend and I thought I’d go on a bike tour of my area of the French Concession. I was surprised to come across Normandie Apartments on HuaiHai Lu – I have seen the flat Iron building in New York and this is a similar shape though not quite as beautiful. It was so nice… Read More »
It was our inaugural village fete at school and the G kids had all made stalls as part of their GCSE Enterprise coursework. They had planned for weeks for this event, bought prizes, organised games, worked out a pricing scheme and done a break-even analysis. At the end of the day I am not sure… Read More »