Before this semester started, I was wandering through a book stall in the mall. They had a bunch of tables set up with random books. Usually these types of book sales are cheaper than the regular bookstore, and often they will sell the books by weight so you can get a...
The food at Haidilao （海底捞） is pretty typical for a hot pot restaurant. When I go with my friends, we usually get the pot with the two sides for soup so we can have one spicy and one not spicy. Since we cook the food in the soup, whatever soup we have will influence...
This semester, I’m auditing another Chinese Literature class. Since this class is called Chinese Literature II, I, along with the other students, assumed that the class would be more focused on recent literature. Our class last semester went from ancient Chinese poems...
Mid-Autumn Festival （中秋节; Zhongqiu Jie) is one of my favorite holidays in China. I like it partly because it reminds me of Thanksgiving which is one of my favorite American holidays. The other day, I was talking with some of my students about the similarities between...
During my first year in China, I had lots of adventures. Some of them were traumatic, some of them were fun, and most of them were crazy. But over the years, I’ve developed less patience for things that look like they are going to be crazy. I started saying no to...
On Monday and Tuesday of this week, I went to Shaoguan （韶关）, a city in the north of Guangdong province to visit a couple of schools. My university has a cooperation with a couple of schools in the Ruyuan （乳源） area, and I am considering the possibility of going there...
In the Chinese literature class that I’ve been auditing, we spent several weeks looking at Tang and Song Dynasty poetry. I never imagined that I would enjoy poetry from these periods. I can barely understand English poetry unless someone explains it to me, but the...
I may have mentioned before that I really enjoy hot pot. China has many different flavors of hot pot. Different areas often have their own specialties. Sichuan and Chongqing hot pots are both spicy but with different degrees of spiciness and with different...
Since I live in Guangzhou (in the Canton area), I have plenty of chances to listen to Cantonese Opera when I’m walking through a park. However, since the music is everywhere, I didn’t realize how often I had heard it until I watched a small Cantonese opera show in the...
One of the advantages of being a university teacher is that I get the chance to see amazing performances. The other day, my roommate, Kendra, and I were out having adventures in the city (I’ll have to tell you more about those in another post). As we were getting on...