Land and Sea Journal – 2
After a big scuffle at the train station’s ticket office, where the concept of queuing was non existent, we boarded the overnight sleeper to Beijing. We thought we had paid for a soft sleeper room, a carriage with only four beds in, but as it turned out there were no...
Sept. 29
After my first month of teaching at SIAS International University in Xinzheng, China, I decided I needed a break.
On cue, China has a work stoppage for the National Holiday. Our students boarded buses and headed for train. Xinzheng (pronounced: Shin-jung) became a ghost town. Well, as much...
City of Oriental mystery.
City with a history of Opium dens, Chinese gangsters, exiled white Russians, sing-song girls and colonials climbing out of rickstraws pulled by pig-tailed Chinamen. That was the old Shanghai, the Shanghai of fifty years ago. The new Shanghai is a roaring dragon - a city...
Well Timed Travel: Yading, China words and photos by Dave Stamboulis The best travels are serendipitous. Going right rather than left on a whim, and finding the road far less traveled because of it. This is getting much harder to do these days, with guidebooks and internet access to every part of...
“We’ll share the memory of this day until our deaths. No one else will ever know what it was like,” my son, Michael, puffed out as we labored our way up a steep, rock-strewn mountainside on the edge of the Himalayas. Indeed, death was very much on my mind as we negotiated the treacherous...