Life in China and Other Expat Tales
From the category archives:
Today for lunch I decided to go native and eat in the airport worker’s canteen (cafeteria).
In most workplaces across China, workers may eat very cheaply in a communal canteen. In most, you must bring your own bowl or container and your own chopsticks or spoon. You have a choice of dishes, usually made up of [...]
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I spent a bit of time this afternoon putting up my Christmas decorations – so what do you think?
Okay, okay, so I didn’t actually put up any decorations. I actually downloaded them. When you are a frequent traveler you learn to travel light. So my holiday decor revolves around my mac desktop.
I have a cute [...]
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Once again I nearly forgot about this one. I couldn’t figure out why no one was emailing today. As you can imagine, Thanksgiving turkey, stuffing and gravy is pretty hard to come by in rural China and even more difficult to recreate in a hotel room. I did have my lunch today with some of [...]
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As I posted yesterday, we’ve arrived! It seemed very natural coming back to China. I guess after our year here, I grew quite accustomed to the Chinese and the language. (Having lived previously 3 years in Toronto’s Chinatown helped, too.)
We spent our first day in Qingdao, meeting some of the head office workers and doing [...]
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You cannot imagine the guilt I feel on leaving this blog update-less and uninteresting for almost 2 weeks.
In my defense, I will say that my epic journey across China left me feeling a bit overwhelmed and tired. Honestly, I began to worry about how I was going to share all that I saw and learned [...]
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The Minister of the CAAC (Civil Aviation Administration of China) is coming to visit our school tomorrow. In order to impress upon him how busy and hardworking we are all, I’ve been asked to put on a “fake class” tomorrow with a group of students. I’m normally off on Saturdays, and so are the English [...]
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Aviation is not something I ever really thought I’d be involved in. I mean, until I met the DH that is. Then I was bombarded with completely unintelligible conversations about airplanes, maneuvers, aviation jobs and all kinds of tall-tales. Anyone married to or dating a pilot will attest to this habit they all have. I [...]
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I guess the weather has just been too nice and cooperative lately because today was not a nice day at all. There seems to be a layer of dust and sand just hanging over us, so much so that it is actually palpable. Evidently this is the transition to Spring – dust and sand storms. [...]
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Whoa, Things are way too boring around here! I need to find something to blog about…
The past week has been very busy for me at work. I’ve been preparing final exams to give to the students which is a nightmare, seeing as how I don’t think very many of them are going to pass. Teaching [...]
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Yesterday, our school was visited by the head of the CAAC – the Civil Aviation Authority of China. This sort of thing is a very big deal here. The road to the Academy from the airport was lined with flags. The campus was spruced up and we were made to hide our bicycles around behind [...]
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I'm an American expat living on the fringe of Chinese society. This blog explores life in China, the occasional aviation topic, expat issues, random travel experiences and interesting things I see, read and hear. 
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