CNYE in China Lite

Guò Nián HÇŽo and welcome to the Year of the Tiger! A couple cups of strong coffee and I’ve recovered from my 5th Chinese New Year‘s Eve in China. Despite living in Suzhou-Singapore Industrial Park (SIP) last year as well, this was the first time we celebrated the holiday in this district. Normally I would …

Murder in the Hood

Murders in the news are as common as the weather report, and are rarely read with any greater attention. It is not often that they touch your life in some way, even if just remotely. Unfortunately, such is not the case with Suzhou’s most recent homicide, as it happened only a couple hundred metres from …

Living in China is Easy…

Living in China is easy – or so says the tag line of my new favourite Web site, 5JShop.com. The site offers home delivery of groceries in and around the Jinji Lake/SIP area of Suzhou. Yeah, we just click, click, click and hit send and magically a man appears the next day with our groceries. …

Who stopped the rain?

Suzhou is green. Hell, it’s a garden city. And a great part about it, is it stays green all year round. It makes the city a nice place to look at no matter what time of year you come here. The tradeoff is that it rains non-stop. We go from rainy season to typhoon season …

Our Apartment in Suzhou SIP (video/photos)

As I mentioned a couple weeks back, we’re moving to a new apartment at the end of the month. As it is fully furnished (I’ve yet to rent an apartment here that isn’t – though some call into question the definition of “fully”), yesterday we had to head over to the new place and meet …

Movin’ on up … to the first floor

Well, it’s official. Mags, Addie and I are all moving to a new apartment at the end of June. We’ve been talking about moving for quite a while now, and with our lease up next month, it was time to either piss or get off the pot… alright, there was no pots, and I wouldn’t …