Category: Travel
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Three Weeks in China: The Dining Highlights
Almost as soon as I have a trip to China planned, I start plotting out my food agenda—old favorites I want to revisit and new places/things I want to try. Since this was a work trip, I spent a lot of meals sitting around banquet tables, eating dishes that were generally delicious but not necessarily…
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Taipei: I Want a Do-Over
I was so excited to go to Taiwan. I’ve only been there once before—for two wonderful weeks back in 2014, right after I finished my dissertation—and was thrilled that my Asia trip this year would conclude in Taipei. I added on a couple of vacation days after the work portion of the trip was schedule…
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Liaoning: Dancing Cabbage, North Korea, and Plenty of History
After a Beijing–Shanghai-Beijing sequence during the first ten days of my China trip, I was off to a new (to me, that is) province: Liaoning (pronounced Lee-OW-ning).* Liaoning is up in China’s industrial northeast, part of the region known as Dongbei described in Michael Meyer’s In Manchuria [affiliate link]. Once the country’s center of heavy…
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A Short Interlude in Swampy Shanghai
After five days of enjoying the beautiful Beijing spring, I headed out to the airport one evening and boarded a flight to Shanghai. As I stood on the tarmac waiting to ascend the plane’s steps, I looked around and thought to myself how absolutely perfect the weather was. Two hours later, I de-planed into the…
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Beijing: Brilliant and Beautiful
I’ve just returned from a three-week work trip to Mainland China and Taiwan, which involved visits to six cities and twenty-two days of hotel breakfast buffets. (I was rather surprised when I woke up in New Jersey this morning and my only choices were oatmeal with peanut butter or toast with peanut butter—and that I’d…
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La La Land
I swear, I didn’t fly all the way to Los Angeles just to get my photo taken with the Property Brothers. It was a bonus. I did go to LA for a couple of meetings, which I deliberately scheduled around the LA Times Festival of Books. I wasn’t completely thrilled that this meant cross-country trips on…
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#AAS2016 and Seattle
I’ve recently returned from the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), which was held in Seattle this year. AAS is my favorite academic conference—it tends to have really strong panels and offers many opportunities to see my friends in the profession—and I enjoy it even more when I can combine it…
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Bookshelf — Knitlandia, by Clara Parkes
I read a lot of books about knitting, and a lot of books about travel, but I’ve never read a travel book about knitting before. There’s a reason for that, as Amazon tells me that this might be a genre with precisely one title in it: Knitlandia: A Knitter Sees the World, recently published by…
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Five Photos from China in 2005
Mid-February always makes me think of my first trip to China, which began when my plane landed in Beijing late at night on February 16, 2005. As I wrote last year, the six months that followed were simultaneously exhilarating and challenging: as much as I loved living on my own and getting to know a…
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Snapshots from a Sojourn in Kansas
“Are you dining alone, honey?” the waitress at Arthur Bryant’s BBQ asked me, surveying my table, three of its four seats empty, with a dismayed glance. Arthur Bryant’s, I had realized, is not a place where people eat solo. The tables around me were filled with families enjoying a Sunday afternoon barbecue lunch, plates stacked…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 