Beijing One Layover at a Time

Once in college, I took a weekend road trip to Wichita. Friends and I drove seventeen hours each way and back. Thanks to a few super chugs of coffee, managed to stay awake both driving and during the Monday morning class. But I can’t do those marathon trips anymore –even when flying to China. I mean, you can’t stop anywhere […]

What the F@#K say?

Yeah! Yesterday was my last day of school. Make that YaWei. It was year to be remembered for many reasons, a lot of  classes spinning out of control, making me wonder if I made a difference with the spinners, those born in the Chinese Year of the Entitled Child. But YaWei, my youngest student, helped me put things in perspective. […]

Leaping Tiger Gorgeous

Every now and then, it’s good to risk your life. Yes, a few friends and I braved Tiger Leaping Gorge near Lijiang, Yunnan and didn’t even get a “I risked my life and all i got was this lousy T-shirt”. The only view more stunning than the gorge when I jumped out of a plane in college and ended up […]

Are you there, Cortana?

            A coworker was telling me about a friend who works for Microsoft. This guy’s job is to fine tune how Cortana works. You know, that annoying voice that greets you when you power up your laptop, asking if you want to add anything to your grocery list. His s job is to actually listen […]

My Chinese Friends

  One of the hardest things about divorce is your friends telling you, “Ginger, you gotta get back out there.” But in China, there is no “there”. Finding English speakers is tough in Kunming.  And quite honestly, the only relationship I’m really interested  right now is with me. But  my ears do miss English, gosh, they crave English: I’d lick […]

Monkeying Around

So I got a real cool teaching tool for my classroom. Not sharpies or flash cards, but a monkey mask. Slightly used, but just a buck fifty. I started the class by telling the students I saw a monkey in front of the school. They weren’t impressed. As they worked on their spelling words,  I had to use the restroom.  […]

Morning Sickness

I have morning sickness. I know what your thinking, I’m not pregnant, I didn’t eat some some weird genetically modified vegetable that resulted in a bun in the oven. It’s just that every morning when I wake up in China, it’s still yesterday in the States, and my lawyer is firing me off emails before wrapping up her day. So […]

Thank You, TSA

  Who do you complain to if the good guys are also the bad guys? If you’ve ever survived a nine hour flight to a foreign speaking country and needed your socks surgically removed upon landing, you’ve probably found a note slipped into your underwear pouch from the TSA. The thought of someone snooping through your stuff is almost as […]

Putting your best 脚 jiǎo forward.

At first,  it just felt like a pebble in my shoe. No big deal. But then suddenly, out of nowhere, try it felt like an abscessed tooth migrated to the ball of my foot. Ouch! Now I understand why they shoot horses. It’s something called Morton’s Neuroma, a thickening of the skin around a nerve between two toes,  common in […]