China Segment

The news in China is a complete joke. The main nightly news just finished Shanghai TV. Let me summarize it.
First, fifteen minutes of self-congratulatory pats on the back for how great Shanghai is. Report after report on how the city has made so many improvements for the 2010 Expo, such as new [...]

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Gifts during Spring Festival usually consist of alcohol, cigarettes, chocolates or other candy, fruit, etc. This year my wife had the great idea to take her grandparents to Shanghai Circus World. We invited Rachel’s parents as well - partly to be nice, but also because we needed someone to drive the grandparents into [...]

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Over the last couple of months I’ve had more than my share of posts that are a little on the negative side, and I really don’t want this blog to turn into a complete rant. I do love this country and this city in many ways, and I should make a better effort to [...]

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My wife got the idea a few weeks back to check out a Shanghai Sharks game this season. I hadn’t been to a basketball game here in probably five years. The buddies I went with before have long since left China, and I guess I just never paid much attention to the local [...]

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The eternal debate about why Shanghai residents wear pajamas outdoors continues unabated… many of us have given up asking, but every new foreigner to Shanghai thinks they have it figured out. I’ve asked many locals and they seem to have different answers. I think I’ve seen it in other cities, but I’ve also [...]

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I may live to regret writing this, but I’m calling out the police of Shanghai, of all China. Everyday more people needlessly die in this country because the police do not enforce the law. Traffic accidents are easily preventable, yet they do nothing. Cars, motorcycles and pedestrians break laws right in front [...]

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I guess I should comment on Kai En English Training School shutting down since I taught there for about four years. I knew the founders personally, and worked there both when it was small and the big schools like EF were just arriving, and later when it was on the way down.
So it’s toast, [...]

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It seems like about 99.8% of people in Shanghai would prefer to take an escalator than the stairs. Yes, the exercise craze has not quite hit Shanghai yet. People here will go way out of their way to get on to the escalator. They’ll walk 30 paces instead of walking up 20 [...]

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My wife and I went to 越剧, Shaoxing Opera, tonight at Yifu Theater in Shanghai. I’d never been to any Chinese opera before, save for the Sichuan Opera mask show at a local restaurant. The story was fairly easy to follow, basically a romantic triangle deal, and I was surprised to find that [...]

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Though city planning seems to be a modern obsession of the Shanghai government, it wasn’t always so. Different periods of growth and expansion overlap everywhere, adding to the charm and unique nature of Shanghai, but also resulting in awful contrasts of architecture and design.
In the picture above, the interior buildings were likely the first [...]

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