Here are three hot business opportunities for anyone entrepreneurial enough to take them. I’m not taking them because I’m an idea person, not an entrepreneur. Beds: More and more Western tourists are traveling to China, yet the…
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Random Notes from China
Accommodations: We pre-booked all of the transportation, transfers and hotels before we left. I just didn’t want the stress of having to figure out train or bus schedules or go from hotel to hotel looking for…
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,…
Toilets in China: On cleanliness and filth
Note added in December 2019: I wrote the following article years ago 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….
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…
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…
Impressions of Beijing
I read quite a bit in guidebooks about Beijing before we came here. Much of what we read was true, but a lot of what I’ve seen (and it’s only been two days) has taken me…
Explaining the health care debate
Every time I try to explain the health care debate to Dutch people I am faced with the same wrinkled-brow, gaping-mouth, puzzled expression that the Japanese president’s wife, Miyuki Hatoyama, must confront when she starts talking…
Thoughts on my Burundi Adventure
I’ve been putting off writing this blog entry, and I’m not sure exactly why. I feel that I need to post something as a sort of summing-up of my Burundi adventure, but I don’t know how……