Monday, February 25, 2013

Links

If yr interested, i updated the links at right to the uber-useful sites for anyone who lives in Beijing.

Also, in  a nutshell, Hanzhong w/ Yoyo's family was great. Everything's beeen going great, until we had a "disagreement" yesterday, and now she's not talking to me, although i'm not 100% clear why.

Oh well.


Friday, February 8, 2013

Off to Meet the GF's Parents!

Chinese New Year: the world's largest migration of people, as family members all compete to secure train, plane and automobile seats back to their hometowns.

This year, I will go to Yoyo's hometown to meet the dad's side of the family. The side that is apparently rather less crazy friendly than the mother's side. You know: siblings who haven't spoken in years, etc etc.

But the dad is pretty stoked to meet me, apparently. He bought a cot for me to sleep on months ago! The mom got special slippers for me and my comparatively large (in China) feet.

And i got a crazy expensive bottle of baijiu  as is traditional, and I'm  very curious to see if it actually tastes much better than the cheap stuff.

Yoyo's warned me that I'll be expected to drink quite a bit this holiday, which could be pretty entertaining, though i know that my Chinese skills will make conversation tricky. Plus apparently there's a somewhat different dialect out there, sure to complicate matters.

The town is Hanzhong: one of those little towns that noone's ever heard of, even if it's home to almost 4 million people.  "It's near Xian" is the best you can do to prove its existence.

So, after an extensive fiasco of passport issues (had to renew my passport so CRI can renew my visa, handed in my passport, realized i can't buy plane/train tickets without a passport, applied for temporary passport [which required lying], and dealt with the woman who insisted that i have to get the visa into my temporary passport before my real passport arrives), me and Yoyo will fly out to Xian tomorrow too bloody early.

I'll be there for 7 days, yay, fun.

新年快乐!= Xinnian kuaile! = Happy (Chinese)  New Year!

Note: Yes, there is an implied message when meeting the gf's parents.



Monday, February 4, 2013

Sort of Forward-Looking

Well, it's great that I get to write stuff for China Radio International, but the truth is, that website kinda sucks. It's super old-school. They spend all this money on the video team, but the website's videos are so old that most computer systems can't even view them. Lucky I don't do video (yet).

But lots of people at CRI know that their work looks like shiz on the CRI  website, so what they do is make their own professional blog.

And now i've made one too.


Some of what i write for CRI is a bit dull, but some of it's pretty decent, methinks so it's good to have a place for the winners. Also, it's good to showcase some of the photos i shot for CRI (often using their swank camera).

So, if you are either a) interested in whatever the heck i write about for CRI, b) are interested in places around China, or c) hope to spend more time online than you have in the past, then i invite you to check out my page.

Dang, it looks hella better than the CRI Travel Page, though i should say that me and my editor are in the process of redesigning that POS, which will make it way better, but, you know. It'll still look like a CRI website.