TRAVEL BLOG: My time in Shanghai could only have been fleeting, though. That’s all a single, unplanned night in one of the largest cities in the world can really afford. And on a backpacker’s dime, that price tag is steep.
Category: Travel Blog
Trade and geopolitics push Japan and China together
JERICHO ONLINE: On the sidelines of the 2017 Asia Pacific Economic Corporation meeting in Da Nang, Vietnam, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping, sparking hopes of an improved relationship for one of the continent’s deepest rivalries. “At the end of the meeting, President Xi said this is a meeting that marks a fresh start of relations between Japan and China,” Abe told reporters. “I totally feel the same way.”
Why Asia?
TRAVEL BLOG: I want to maybe answer why it is that I dedicated my last year and a half of college - and my professional future - to a massive continent most Americans will likely never see beyond news headlines and the tags on their clothes.
In Memory of a Hutong Pizzeria
TRAVEL BLOG: Following the opening of China, hutongs have been leveled and churned into a modern city of high rises and shopping malls, which is why only a thousand of the original three thousand survive today. They’ve become the cultural Mecca for tourists looking to engage with the city, where traditional architectures and layouts haven’t quite given away to modern skyscrapers just yet. Maybe this is why the red bricks in Ramo Pizza’s windows were so striking.
Photography: Nanshi Food Street, 2017
PHOTOGRAPHY: I’ve written about Tianjin’s Nanshi Food Street before. The three-story complex, built in 1984 in the Qing style of the nearby Ancient Culture Street and Tianjin Old Town, is a bazaar of cuisines that draw from across China. It was my first real introduction to Tianjin, the city I would call home for the next few months.
Photography: Beijing, 2017
PHOTOGRAPHY: Beijing is often dismissed as a city that lost its culture, the Chinese capital locked in a perpetual identity crisis as it paints itself as the traditional center of the Middle Kingdom and the focal point of a modern China. It’s also an amazingly blunt tourist trap. But it’s also a fairly beautiful city with a cultural wealth both new and old.
The Forbidden City Behind the Heavenly Gate
TRAVEL BLOG: The Forbidden City has an enormous presence, both literally and figuratively. Its first gate, the Tiananmen (“Gate of Heavenly Peace”), stretches out across the northern edge of the square of the same name. Behind it, 180 acres of centuries-old buildings spread out to four distant corners, bound together as an even rectangle.
“Annyeonghaseyo”
TRAVEL BLOG: I’ve officially left China. The program anchoring me in Tianjin has finished, and my student visa is forcing me to leave the country that – after three months of ruddy hotels and bullet trains – stole my heart. This is why I now write from a café in Seoul, the haphazard metropolitan hub and capital of South Korea.
Yunlong at Midnight
TRAVEL BLOG: Amid the buzz and rumble of an indiscriminate Jiangsu industrial center, at a lake rung with refineries and asphalt, where a six million-strong population earns the title of “smaller city,” things finally felt at peace.
On Chinese Rain and the Tianjin Sun
TRAVEL BLOG: “You know, some rabbis teach that rain is good, that, in a way, it represents rebirth. Have you ever heard of this?”
Michael Frett 