War graves in Belgium: Living among the dead
With so many Belgium war graves, memorials, monuments, trenches and museums in the Ypres Salient, it’s as if the locals live among the dead.
Travel
How NOT to design a bathroom!
We ate lunch yesterday at a café in Gent. Afterwards, I went inside to use the toilet, followed the signs upstairs, came around a corner, and saw this.
In Flanders Fields Museum: A review
The In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium, is one of the most effective museums I’ve ever been to. It focuses on WWI in the Ypres Salient. Read my review here.
Chinese Tourists
Everywhere we’ve gone so far, there have been very few foreign tourists like us. Most of the tourists — and in some places all of the tourists — are Chinese. Sometimes they’re in pairs or families, sometimes in groups. When they’re in a group, even if it’s just 5 or 6 people, they hire a…
Toilets in China: On cleanliness and filth
Note added in December 2019: I wrote the following article years ago in Hancheng, China, and I see now how terribly judgemental I was about toilets in China. I’ve added some tips and comments to update it a bit. My message now is: be aware of how you communicate and behave around the issue of…
Intercultural Understanding and Chinese Beds
When I started teaching a class in intercultural communication this past year at the teacher training college, I didn’t actually know anything about it. Or rather, I didn’t know any of the theory, but I’d had a whole lot of practice. I had plenty of anecdotes to share, for example, about differences in expectations and…
Conspicuous Consumption
In my last entry, I mentioned how it seemed to me that the Chinese have wholeheartedly embraced conspicuous consumption. Visiting the Forbidden City the other day emphasized that for me. You could say that the emperors of pre-revolutionary China were the originators of the concept for this part of the world. They represent the ultimate…
On not being a VIP in Rome
We were in Rome yesterday and the day before, but apparently so were representatives of the G8 nations and other VIPs. Sights/sites closed or opened arbitrarily to accommodate their whistle-stop visits. A note from 2020: I wrote this post back in 2009, one of my earliest ones. I usually try to keep my articles useful…