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 »
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 »
I am fed up of all my friends being away for my holiday as its always during holiday tie. It seems everyone has birthday parties except me. So I took drastic action and decided to have a birthday party when the weather was nice and when everyone was around. The South Bund was chosen as… Read More »
There are so many interesting jobs open to foreigners in China such as acting, modelling and being a fake business executive for a company. Recently I have done another typical foreigner job – the voice-over artist. Firstly I had to send the studio a voice sample. For this, I went into a soundproof room in… Read More »
Who would have thought that there was a place in Shanghai which was green, peaceful and clean(ish). On the South Bund there is plenty of room to walk, throw a risbee, fly a kite and pitch a tent. On a warm spring day, there are fewer nicer places to hang out. Apart from the massive… Read More »
It’s been many years since anyone knocled on my door and asked me to come out to play. In fact, livng in a remote house down a lane in the middle of nowhere, friends had to make a big effort in order to get to my childhood home, so callers were rare. But here in… Read More »
It sounded like a great idea – go camping on a farm on an island in the Yantze River. It sounded like it was going to be a peaceful and restful experience. Nobody told me that the campsite was under the flight path of Pudong International Airport, and that planes flew overhead every 90 seconds… Read More »
The West Bund is not a place I have spent much time in but went I took a shared bike from the metro I was pleasantly surprised at how peaceful and clean it is down there. There is an area of West Bund which is home to a variety of art galleries. When I was… Read More »
I didn’t need kitchen supplies but it was nice sunny spring day and I wanted to stretch my legs so I went up to the part of the city where you can pick up anything from a coffee machine to a rattan basket, delicate porcelain tea services to earthenware jugs. The firrst thing I noticed… Read More »
It’s not far to the metro station for Shanghai Sculpture Park – SheShan on Line 9. However, when you get there it’s a bit of scrum with buses and taxis and people whizzing around on shared bikes. Of course on a sunny weekend day in spring it’s even more frantic. I made the mistake of… Read More »