Archive for the ‘China Travel’ Category
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CNYE in China Lite
Guò Nián Hǎo and welcome to the Year of the Tiger!
A couple cups of strong coffee and I’ve recovered from my 5th Chinese New Year’s Eve in China. Despite living in Suzhou-Singapore Industrial Park (SIP) last year as well, this was the first time we celebrated the holiday in this district. Normally I would just hit Shiquan Jie (Suzhou’s bar street) for the big event, as its location in the downtown core puts it smack dab in the middle of all the action.
Because of our pregnancy, and a newborn in our tribe, we decided to keep…
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World-renowned author visits Humanaught
Alright, Lisa might not be world-renowned yet, but she’s well on her way. And she’s certainly a well-known fixture in the China expat/blogging circle.
Perhaps best known as “Other Lisa” in the comments at the Peking Duck (or @otherlisa on Twitter), Lisa’s a long-time blogger (her blog, Paper Tiger Tail is one of my favs., she was also a past contributor at the Duck) and has the distinction of having seen a side of China most of us expats have only read about in books.
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Dalian vs. Suzhou
Despite the combative title, it’s rather tough to A-B the two places I’ve spent the most time with in China. They are both supported and mired by a number of attributes that make them both rather unique places to live.
Last week Maggie and I grabbed a flight out of PVG and made our annual pre-holiday trip to visit the inlaws and friends in Dalian. That we both work outside the confines of anyone’s schedule but our own, we are fortunate that we can travel when the rest of the country is distractedly focused on tying up loose ends before…
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Chinese cities with beautiful women, I seem to know how to pick ‘em
Before moving to Dalian in 2005 I spent a good amount of time on the Internet researching the place to see if it was the type of city I’d like to live in. Looking back on what I read, it was the typical “Dalian is a beautiful sea-side city” tourist crap that I would hear mindlessly repeated to the point of nausea while living there.
What wasn’t mentioned on the Web sites I reviewed, but was added to the rhetoric after I arrived was that Dalian girls are considered some of the most beautiful women in China. I’m betting had…
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Suzhou info page finally fleshed + Suzhou district map
In any given week I usually get 2-3 e-mails from people just arrived or arriving in Suzhou. As one of the longest running blogs with a focus on living in Suzhou, Google gives me some love and I in turn do my best to pass it along. In an effort to provide information about the most common questions I’m asked, and to give myself a dumping ground where I can put random Suzhou information, I’ve done up the creatively titled Suzhou Information page.
It’s something I’ve been intending to put together for a couple years now (as the dead-end…
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Olive (Delhi Palace) – Some great Indian food in Suzhou
Yesterday afternoon Maggie came home with the latest edition of MORE magazine, one of Suzhou’s handful of expat-geared mags, and a glowing review of a new Indian food place caught her attention. As a yoga instructor, she tends to be a bit of an India-fangrrl.
The review extolled the place as Suzhou’s hidden sub-continental jewel, an unassuming restaurant oddly named “Olive” situated just off Shiquan Jie right beneath Q’s Club on the far eastern end of the bar street. I hadn’t had any authentic Indian food in ages, and being that it was Saturday night and we had nothing…
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Trippin on HDR
Well, I’ve been back from travelling for nearly a week now, and am only just getting organized. I plan to post a full summary of my and my friend Cory’s summer travels around China’s tourist triangle, just as soon as I get all my photos organized.
To tide things over, here are a few photos from our trip that I shot with an eye towards converting them to High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. HDR photography is a method of processing images to “accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows…
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Holiday Fu’s Suzhou City Guide
Iain Manley, editor of City Weekend’s relatively new Holiday Fu, has just put together an excellent city guide for Suzhou. Most all the large travel portals give Suzhou a mention, but Iain’s writeup is full of a wit and insight that makes it a fun and informative read, even for this laowai that has called the place home for three years now.
Locals half-heartedly bemoan the changes prosperity has brought. The city, they say, is irrevocably different. But Suzhou has hung onto its character, and is an excellent place to witness the contrast and clash of new and old in
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Murder in the Hood
Murders in the news are as common as the weather report, and are rarely read with any greater attention. It is not often that they touch your life in some way, even if just remotely.
Unfortunately, such is not the case with Suzhou’s most recent homicide, as it happened only a couple hundred metres from where I sleep, and to someone I’ve (if only peripherally) very likely met.
This past Wednesday morning the bloodied and naked body of a girl in her early 20s was found in her Singha Plaza (Xīn Dū GuǎngChǎng) apartment. Despite sharing the apartment with…
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My ChinaTravel.net Feature on Suzhou
A while back I was approached by the fine folks at ChinaTravel.net, an English-language travel site about China that is “editorially independent” but strongly affiliated with Ctrip.com — one of China’s largest online travel booking Web sites.
The site’s editors wanted me to put together a summary article on “my Suzhou”, and as of last week it was published on the site. For anyone that’s ever asked my opinion about what to see while visiting Suzhou the content will feel familiar, as it generally just rehashes what I’ve suggested to people many many times over the years I’ve…
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WTF, Suzhou 14th worst place in the world to work? Sissies!
A recent article in BusinessWeek featured a slideshow displaying 20 of the World’s Worst Places to Work. Unsurprisingly some Chinese cities made the list – surprisingly Suzhou was among them.
The list, compiled by New York-based human resources company ORC Worldwide, states the major reasons for giving Suzhou the thumbs down are pollution and a lack of culture & recreation facilities. Other problems included disease/sanitation, medical facilities, education facilities, and availability of goods and services.
It needs to be asked: has ORC Worldwide ever even been to Suzhou?
Granted, their list was compiled for BusinessWeek and specifically for…
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In Sanya – Final Thoughts
Alright, I could pretend like the week and a half since we returned from Sanya was used to properly reflect on the vacation before I post final thoughts about China’s only tropical destination. But that would be a lie.
Every time I go on vacation I think to myself, “Hey, why the hell am I not doing this ALL the time. This is great! Problems are so far away. The air is fresh. The food it fantastic. Life is moving at a pace I am entirely comfortable with.” Then I get home — load up the 200+ e-mails, overflowing RSS…
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In Sanya – Holiday… celebrate…
There’s something entirely appealing about blogging while looking out over a sunny palm-lined beach and the sea beyond. It has a quality I could definitely get used to.
Mags and I are down in Sanya, Hainan, for a week-long sun and fun vacation to celebrate our second anniversary. Long-time readers will remember that we got married on a beach in Sanya. We are actually staying at the exact same apartment complex on Sanya Bay that we stayed at the last time we were here.
When it comes to staying in Sanya you essentially have three options – Yalong Bay,…
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Karmatic Moment of the Week: Snake Rescue
I got an early phone call from my friend and neighbour Kevin today. It’s not odd that he called, he often calls, but it did seem weird it was only 9 a.m.
“Ryan, can you come outside for a minute, I need a hand.”
In slippers and pajamas I wander out into the apartment building’s entrance to see what’s going on and find Kevin carefully examining what looks to be a couple pieces of paper.
“I’ve got a snake,” Kevin says, too focused on the critter to see my surprise.
Turns out that he had innocently thrown a few stickers…
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‘Best Band in Beijing’ coming to Suzhou
Just got word that Woodie Alan, the band City Weekend calls the “Best Band in Beijing”, is coming to Suzhou for a one show performance on Friday night.
The show’s taking place at J&J Restaurant (No.5, Block 11, Horizon Resort II, SIP) and runs from 9 until 11. Tickets will set you back 60 RMB per 人, which seems a bit pricey to this laowai, but fits the swanky venue and up-scale expat crowd and that hangs around Horizon I suppose. Whether such a spot will fit the smokey jam-band blues of Woodie Alan has yet to be seen.…
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A Son of Dalian
I’ve just returned from 5 days offline and out of Suzhou – two things I’m generally quite adverse to subjecting myself to. It was rather refreshing.
As the last time I got my visa in Suzhou the woman told us in no uncertain terms not to come back, Mags and I knew we’d be heading to Dalian this month when my visa expired. Any trip to Dalian is generally a welcomed one for Maggie, as it means she can visit with her family. For me it means squirming through uncomfortable Chinese conversations with my inlaws, and getting drunk with…
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Yoga lessons in Suzhou’s SIP – Maggie gets a Web site
About a week and a half ago Maggie told me she was a bit worried because there was an unprecidented meeting of a large group of “business people” at her yoga studio when she arrived to teach her class.
Turns out her fears were not unfounded, and last week the whole business closed (it was one part yoga studio and one part female beautification factory).
Details of what exactly happened are sketchy, but best I’ve been able to piece together is that about six months ago the owner of the business realized the place was going down hill (the yoga…
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A weekend in Hangzhou
Last weekend Maggie and I finally got down to Hangzhou. We’d been meaning to visit the place (a mere 2 hour bus ride from Suzhou) since moving here two years ago, but it always seemed to fall by the wayside.
With work keeping us both insanely busy, it’s been a little too easy to forget that we really do need to make time and get out and do somethings just her and I. The heat was repressive, but the break from Suzhou and work was nice.
Hangzhou, for anyone that doesn’t know the place, is the capital of Zhejiang…
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Frigin’ cool interactive Chinese city maps – including Suzhou
Mags and I are heading for a rare vacation down to Hangzhou this weekend, and as such have been trolling around the travelweb looking for sights to see, hotels to stay at and maps of the area.
It was this last item that lead me to revisit EDuShi (E-City). A few weeks back Rich (All Roads Lead to China) pointed me to the site’s Shanghai map and I was blown away, and am now even more impressed that they have most major cities in the country covered – including Suzhou!
Anyone that was a fan of Simcity will…
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Yeeling: 
AJB: 
Ping Pong: 
ccddmj: 
ji xiang: 
