China Fakes
I’m sitting in a Czech restaurant in Ulan Bator drinking Budweiser (the real one) and missing the one thing about China that Mongolia cannot replicate: the food. Wondering what to order, other than copies of eastern European fare and after three weeks of forced consumption of mutton tail, freeze-dried beef, and yak fat (there’s not [...]
Couchsurfing Beijing
To follow the myriad tourists who pack shoulder to shoulder into cliched cultural spots taking the same horrible digital photographs of the early morning elderly Tai Chi Chuan practitioners and the ubiquitous liveried soldiers would be, to my mind, to miss the real city. Today is no day for sightseeing, rather starting the ball rolling on more than merely watching and regurgitating what the world already knows the Chinese do everyday, moreover to take part in their interior lives.
Reimagining Shanghai
Manny asks some hard hitting questions on this his second stop on the Round the World Trip™ in the patchwork city of Shanghai and its chaotic culture of consumption: Am I going gray? Can Haibao save us all? Find out…