Chengdu falls neatly into the orbit of massive, bustling Chinese cities that the West has given almost no thought to. Certainly I hadn’t, beyond a vague sense that it was in Sichuan and was where people went if they wanted to go see pandas. I was not expecting an immense, modern metropolis with a Metro […]
Author: Faine Greenwood
China: The Shanghai Museum
Wherever I go, I always visit the museum, operating off the assumption that a people’s hand-picked selection of interesting objects are always worth seeing. Provincial or national – I love them all. The Shanghai Museum, unsurprisingly, is a particularly worthy entrant. Most pleasantly? It’s free. The Shanghai Museum is situated near the People’s Park area […]
Some Thoughts on Shanghai and What to Do There
I haven’t been to China since 2007. Eighteen at the time, I spent a summer in Beijing ostensibly studying English, but devoting considerably more time to wandering around in hutongs, drinking baijiu, and feeling incrementally more alienated. (As well as coughing up black chunks of indeterminate material on a regular basis, due to the air). […]
Some Thoughts on Shanghai
I arrived in Shanghai at the totally uncivilized hour of 5:00 AM – and, unsurprisingly, saw that the airport area was surrounded in a thick bank of typically Chinese-style haze. (For a moment, I convinced myself it was fog. Lies). Going through customs proved painless enough, and I spent a while wandering the airport […]
Some Thoughts on Orwell’s Essays (And Doom)
I’m reading Orwell’s Essays, pretty much on a total impulse: there they were in swiftly bootlegged format (the Penguin edition) on the shelves of a bookshop in a Cambodian river town. And I needed something to read. I harbor the intelligent child’s usual vague fondness for Orwell (or Eric Blair, of course), crafted from close […]
In Which I Evaluate Some Humanitarian UAVs
As those who have interacted with me at any time in the recent past are aware, I’m really fond of UAVs, which some of you might know better as “drones.” I’m incredibly excited by the possibility of using flying robots with cameras on them in both journalism and in humanitarian aid. They will provide us […]
Taiwan: Paoan Temple and Confucius Temple
I have never come across a temple with as many conflicting, alternative spellings as Taipei’s Paoan Temple. Attempting to Google this beautiful structure is a remarkable tour through wildly different philosophies about spelling out Chinese words in English. It’s also called Bao’an, or Baoan, or….you get the idea. Regardless, you should Google it, because the […]
In Which I Confess I Like Florida
I harbor a controversial belief: I like Florida. It is time for me to admit that I am in fact from Florida – one of those curiously marked number who did not alight in the state from somewhere else on the way to somewhere else again. I was born in Tampa and my earliest culinary […]
Taiwan: The Maokong Gondola, Ignore Hello Kity
Taiwan’s tourism board is very intent on getting you to go try out the Maokong Gondola. A gondola system imported from France, Taipei hails it as one of its top tourist destinations, allowing visitors to be conveniently ferried from the Taipei Zoo to the Zhinan Temple without having to clog up the roads or hail […]
Taiwan: Taipei Night Markets
Night markets are likely Taipei’s most iconic attraction, and probably the one most visible to those who have never visited the country before. Food Adventurers like Anthony Bourdain regularly traipse through them with a camera crew following behind, sampling this and that from different carts, beneath a canopy of red-and-yellow lights. Not that I’m going […]