sip Archives - Ryan McLaughlin

CNYE in China Lite

GuÃ² NiÃ¡n 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 …

February 14, 2010

// 8 Comments

// Read More »

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 …

May 10, 2009

// 10 Comments

// Read More »

WTF, Suzhou 14th worst place in the world to work? Sissies!

A recent article in BusinessWeek featured a slideshow displaying 20 of the World’s Worst Places to Work. Unsurprisingly some Chinese cities made the list – surprisingly Suzhou was among them. The list, compiled by New York-based human resources company ORC Worldwide, states the major reasons for giving Suzhou the thumbs down are pollution and a …

March 20, 2009

// 20 Comments

// Read More »

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. …

October 30, 2008

// 12 Comments

// Read More »

Yoga lessons in Suzhou’s SIP – Maggie gets a Web site

About a week and a half ago Maggie told me she was a bit worried because there was an unprecidented meeting of a large group of “business people” at her yoga studio when she arrived to teach her class. Turns out her fears were not unfounded, and last week the whole business closed (it was …

September 17, 2008

// 8 Comments

// Read More »

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 …

July 8, 2008

// 6 Comments

// Read More »

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 …

June 8, 2008

// 21 Comments

// Read More »

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 …

May 21, 2008

// 5 Comments

// Read More »