Category: China

I am American. I moved from Singapore to China in 2022.

Food Festival

Why was I at this food festival? Not to eat, ironically!

I’ve been eating too much, completely without realizing it, because I didn’t bring a scale with me to China. After I finally got one, and finally got batteries for it, and finally put the batteries in, it gave me bad news. (Even without converting the kilogram readout to pounds, I knew it was bad news.)

So it was decided I need to walk more. Fine. During the weekend, rather than drive to visit the nearest mall, Siqi and I walked. It was really hot, and also kinda rainy, but we walked there anyway. (We both carried umbrellas, to ensure that it would not start raining harder.) And lo and behold, when we got there, there was this festival. Wait till you see one of the carnival games they had there!

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The Road to Suzhou

Every place is a place, and connecting places, there are roads. Along the roads, there are trees, plants, buildings, bridges, lights, power lines, signs, and maybe animals. There are millions of combinations of things you can see out the window of a car. And if you’re not driving, you can take photos. Which is what I did on the road to Suzhou.

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Suzhou

My boyfriend Siqi drove us to Suzhou for a short vacation when we had a long weekend for the Dragon Boat Festival national holiday here in China. Suzhou is famous for “Venice-like” water towns, ancient residential complexes with exquisitely landscaped courtyard gardens, and the city museum adjacent to the city’s most famous garden.

We didn’t plan very far in advance—in fact, we didn’t plan much at all—but we still enjoyed our time. The main tourist sites were completely booked and/or full of people, but we were lucky with the weather, and were able to amuse ourselves just fine by walking around in the historic district. Now that we’re more familiar with Suzhou’s geography, we know where to go when we go back, which is easy to do since Suzhou is just next door to Hangzhou.

I took photos mainly of:

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Spring trees at Zhejiang Lab Nanhu Campus

The Zhejiang Lab campus is impressive, not least because a veritable army of gardeners is employed to look after the enormous variety of trees, bushes, grass, and flowers. I appreciate their work daily on my short walk to the main building, and during lunchtime strolls, which take me and my colleagues in different directions on different days.

This post features flowering trees. Some are cherry blossom (sakura), but mostly I don’t know what kind of trees they are; kinda wish I did.

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China culture shock: English on signs

The holy grail of Chinglish, for me, would be to see in person a sign saying “Carefully Slip And Fall Down“.

Since the English on signs in Hangzhou is not by any means so terrible on average, I’m still looking.

Meanwhile, I’ve spotted quite a few other amusing signs in Hangzhou.

Have a guess… what kind of store advertises its products as “cheap, fresh, quality, intimate”? See below to find out!

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