A China Blog On Suzhou Expat Life

万圣节(前夕)快乐

Well, we’ve got our little Jieke ‘o’ Denglong lit and The Sixth Sense (which Maggie’s never seen) in the DVD player, but I just wanted to wish everyone a very happy Halloween.

Here are some vintage Daily Show episodes to help you all celebrate - does it get better than Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert and Jon [...]

Burger King in Suzhou?

After a night out at the Shamrock, Suzhou’s defacto Irish pub, surrounded by fellow non-Asian faces most of which are rattling on in English, it’s sometimes easy to forget where you are.
This is likely why, while sipping some post-closing brew at a little canal-side gazebo (Suzhou’s cool that way) around the corner that a bit [...]

Raise the Orange Lantern: Chinese Halloween Vocab

A Charlie Brown special Halloween in China is not, however the festival’s flavour is undeniably in the air.
It seems every spot in town is putting together a Halloween party of some kind or another - with one bar being ambitious enough to force their staff to come to the foreign language area of SuDa and [...]

Guess who’s coming to Christmas dinner?

Hint: It’s not Sidney Poitier.
We made our third and final visa trip to Shanghai yesterday. After about 45 minutes of watching a muted DVD of Canada’s more scenic side, Maggie got called in for her interview.
Neither of us knew really what to expect, but to calm her nerves about the whole thing we had role-played [...]

Gettin’ Smashed

As some might remember, I bought an e-bike a few months back.
It’s pretty much replaced taxis as my primary mode of transportation (taxis having replaced buses shortly after I got caught in the rear door pushing my way on an overstuffed bus).
For a city like Suzhou I would even go so far as to saying [...]