Big Aab visits China

My sister visited me over January, and wrote down a few of the things which impressed her the most. It’s good seeing China again through fresh eyes. After a year here, I take for granted that you never flush toilet paper, that at restaurants water comes to the table hot or at least warm, that everything is eaten with chopsticks, that no one speaks English, and that Chinese characters are unintelligble unless you’ve learned them.

So here are some excerpts from my sister’s Big Aabservations: Continue reading

798 reasons to like chartruese

Red China is slowly becoming chartreuse.  In February my life-long friend, fashion follower and now Doctor Kristina Perez (having just gotten her well-deserved PhD from Cambridge for her dissertation on the occasional-goddess and Arthurian character Morgan La Fey) came over to China for the first time, with Wallpaper* and Elle Decorations magazines in hand.  So we went on a tour of a part of China that I knew almost nothing about:  the trendy part.

 

You know you are a trendy place in China when there’s lot of chartreuse. Continue reading

Cold Feet

It was when the chocolate melted that we realized we weren’t being picky — our air-shaft facing room at one of Beijing’s top hotels was unacceptably hot. So my Dad (the lawyer) smoothly advocated for an upgrade. And it was in the new room, sipping green tea, with my feet up on our new balcony watching a true blue-to-red sunset settle in over Tiananmen Square, while thousands of silhouetted black birds soared through the sky seeking a perch for the night, that I finally felt ready for the next leg of the adventure.

It seems silly to complain about heat. In Beijing, everything is heated and front doors are closed. In “southern” China, where I’ve been for the past year and for much of our travels, it just isn’t. Continue reading