An interesting thing happened to me on the way to the forum…for the first time in my life, I could have used some Ex-Lax ( Read more... )

So even in Shanghai, Election Day was just as painful for me as it probably was for all my compadres back in San Francisco. I carried my laptop to all my meetings and paid attention to nary a word. Every few minutes, npr.org would color up one state red or blue, and each new state that turned red was like a new massive paper-cut on my left thumb. ( Read more... )

I first met Keith when he was a baby to the world of Shanghai. When he left in September, he was a gigolo with a patch of stubble on his face. Keith was snatched away from us in his Shanghai prime, and while I will do all that I can to bring him back to where he belongs, I can’t help but feel that the end of an era has closed. Ribald Keith has left ( Read more... )

In light of the retroactive blogging that I am forced to do to cover the amount of temporal surface area I originally neglected the first time around, I will try present a montage of my first full summer in Shanghai, hopefully by juicing it up enough that you’ll want to keep reading while keeping the salaciousness down to a minimum for those of you ( Read more... )

Shortly after I returned from my trip to Tibet, I accepted an offer to return to Intel Finance based out of Shanghai. Thanks to Margene, I was quickly able to contact the right people who would hire me, and luckily they were looking for people to hire, so the initial process was fairly relaxed and smooth. After nine months of studying, traveling, ( Read more... )

Creepiness permeated the air as the four of us climbed up the ravine. Perhaps it was the clutters of symmetrically stacked stones that pimpled up from the gravel. Or maybe it was the massive strings of Tibetan prayer flags that hung from the skeletal posts next to the ghostlike structure at the top of the hill, flaps of colors that looked once ( Read more... )

One fateful day in Lhasa, Tina decided to skip out on breakfast and had some instant noodles in her room instead ( Read more... )

"I may be old, ja, but I have a big battery!" the middle-aged German man said while rubbing his enlarged stomach. His accent was thick (he had only learned English since arriving in Shanghai two years prior) but it was jolly, and the twinkle in his eye confessed a belief that being young was purely in the head ( Read more... )

It’s been far too long between today and my last official blog entry, and I attribute that completely to the fact that I’ve not had a good thirty minutes to sit in front of the computer and ruminate since I came back from Tibet. My friends Spencer and Henry made a pit stop here in China on their grand tour through the sights and tastes of Asia ( Read more... )

I'm sitting in another Internet cafe right now in Shigetsu, Tibet, but don't have much time to update this blog as my two German companions Rafael and Simon are waiting to get in and out of here as quickly as possible, probably because the combination of the high altitude (4500 meters above sea level) and the cloud of Tibetan cigarette smoke here ( Read more... )