Review: Last Train Home

There's an undeniable disconnect between being a foreigner in China and being a Chinese in China. Yeah, I know, thank you Captain Obvious. As self-evident as that statement is, it's sometimes easy to neglect the truth in it and ignore the consequences of what it is to be Chinese in China.

Maybe this is only true for me, but when I first arrived in China I was fascinated with everything. I sucked it all in like a s…

Video: 2011 Year of the Rabbit

So, it's a little late and most of us have begrudgingly returned to work, but 新年快乐 fellow laowai.

I captured my own thoughts, photos and videos of my 6th Chinese New Year's Eve on my blog, and so won't waste space with a reiteration here.

However, I wanted to share this great short video by Jonah M. Kessel, Paul Morris and Kit Gillet:

2011: The Year of the Rabbit from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

To capture…

24 hours / 24 photos — Spring Festival in Liuzhou

Michael Steverson, better known as "Expatriate Games" in the blogsphere and on Flickr, has put together an awesome project entitled "Xin Nian Hao - 24 Hours in Liuzhou". The series of photos and accompanying stories chronicle an entire day (one photo an hour) over CNYE and into the early morning hours of the first day of the new lunar year.

The 4:35:19 AM shot was my favourite for the story that followed the s…

Chun Jie: The Next Generation

I really like Spring Festival. Honestly. Every year I hear the arguments about the "crazy Chinese and their crazy fireworks", but despite the noise (and limb-losing danger) I have to admit that I get a bit caught up in the season.

I suppose I've not been here long enough yet to truly understand what that holiday feeling is, certainly not to the extent my wife and her compatriots do. Being home for the Christmas se…

Safety During Spring Festival

This past week, while many people were out celebrating the Spring Festival holiday, I was stuck in my apartment with a disease I might fairly compare to demon possession in terms of severity. The upside of this condition was that I got to spend a lot of quality time listening to, watching, and being startled by my neighbors' firework displays. Somewhere between the five-hundredth car alarm set off by firecrackers and…