Category: Travel
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Ten Thoughts about Myanmar
I’m back in Shanghai and trying to work through an epic to-do list while the back of my mind is still mulling all the things I saw and did in Myanmar. In no particular order, here are ten thoughts that struck me during my six days in the country: 1. I was so much more…
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All Aboard the Yangon Circle Line
The Yangon Circle Line train is the exact opposite of Chinese high-speed rail. Over the course of three hours, the Circle Line traces a route only 28.5 miles long; there are points when the train moves so slowly that it seems like it would be faster to get out and walk. During the short stretches…
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Myanmar So Far, In Five Pictures
Pretty much the whole Yangon airport appears sponsored by Samsung. Quick Wednesday morning stop at one of the many tea shops lining Yangon’s streets. The tea is thick, milky, and super-sweet; it’s never going to replace black coffee in my daily routine. Spire of the Sule Pagoda, a stupa that occupies a traffic circle not…
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One Night in Kunming and Scattered Thoughts on Travel
Greetings from Yangon, Myanmar (or Rangoon, Burma, depending on your politics), where I’m spending the Chinese National Day break. To get to Yangon, I first had to fly to Kunming, a city in southwest China that serves as a sort of gateway to Southeast Asia. Due to a combination of flight schedules and my own…
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A Weekend in Pingyao, Part II: A Journey of Ten Thousand Steps
Pingyao’s most notable feature is its centuries-old city wall, which stands ten meters high, a fortress of sloping brick—brown in some lights, gray in others—topped with crenellations through which cannons could be shot if the city needed to defend itself. The six-kilometer-long wall would form a square, if not for its squiggly southern edge. Six…
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A Weekend in Pingyao, Part I: A Journey of a Thousand Miles
It seemed like half the people on my flight from Shanghai to Taiyuan were coughing—short, dry testimonies to the coal city’s infamy as one of the most polluted places in China. Taiyuan deserves that reputation, I saw as I rode a bus from the airport to the train station: a thick yellow haze hung in…
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LA Review of Books: Take Me Out to the Ballgame, in Taipei
Golf on Monday, baseball today … based on what I’ve been writing lately, I probably seem like more of a sports fan than I actually am. Just a coincidence, though. Well, not completely. I am a huge baseball fan and don’t get to indulge this passion when I’m here in Shanghai. That’s one of the…
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Wanderings: Two Weeks in Taiwan
I’ll begin by admitting that I was wrong. I know a lot of people who have spent significant amounts of time in Taiwan—studying Chinese or doing archival research—and without fail, they tell me that they prefer Taiwan to mainland China. It’s cleaner, it’s better organized and better run and easier to get things done, the…
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From Sea to Shining Sea—By Train
For a cross-country trip, taking the train doesn’t make much sense. It’s far slower than flying, and more expensive to boot. But my mother and I both love riding trains and have been talking about doing a big trip for years, so we finally decided that last week’s graduation in Southern California provided the perfect…
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Five Great Things about Beijing
In the mostly friendly Beijing-Shanghai rivalry game, I’m firmly on Shanghai’s side. I spent six months in Beijing in 2005, and have made regular visits since then, but I’ve never quite warmed up to the city. When people defend their choice to live in the capital, I point to Beijing’s chronically smoggy skies, its often…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 