We had a few onlookers for our climb today at the ‘Twin Gate’ crag which was among the fields but much easier to find than yesterday (yesterday we set out to find ‘The Egg’ but a new road had been paved rendering our directions useless, and after getting lost among the mandarin orange orchards and [...]
March 12, 2010
Adrift in a Sea of Mandarin
I was going to do a post about the found poetry of Taiwanese promotional brochures. I was also going to be sure to highlight the remarkable niceness of the Taiwanese people (they really were strikingly helpul to us hapless foreigners in multiple instances). Perhaps I still will or maybe they’ll just get added to the [...]
March 11, 2010
China: the final frontier (an introductory post)
Yángshuò is known as China’s backpacker haven, but there just aren’t that many here – at least, not in nearly the same numbers as in Thailand (may have something to do with the expensive and hard to get visas, or the fact that it was 5 degrees celsius when we got here, though it’s since [...]
March 6, 2010
Author Update
Bowing to his wife’s nagging and her insatiable need for recognition and aprobation, Mark has finally added new users to the blog so you can know who wrote what: Zoe, Mark, or Zoe and Mark (we sometimes pass each other the iPod every other paragraph).
As a retrospective guide, if the post (or paragraph) includes kvetching [...]
February 26, 2010
Contemplated blog posts
Topics we wanted to write about, but never got around to:
- Crossing the street in Hanoi: a primer by Mark and Zoe
- Driving a motorbike with one hand while carrying a parasol: a primer by Laotian school girls
- Horn honking as a defensive (and offensive) driving mechanism: a primer by Vietnamese bus drivers
- Regional variation [...]
February 11, 2010
Vivre le Roi
Thais love their king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, also known as Rama IX. He’s been on the throne since 1946, longer than any other Thai monarch. Now, however, he’s in the hospital as speculation rages over whether he will be replaced by his neer-do-well son or more beloved, but less likely for succession because she’s a [...]
