Parched in Portugal
We spent the last week town-hopping through Portugal, from Lisbon up to Porto. 🚙🇵🇹 And of course we spent our time taking as many goofy videos as possible. 🎬🤡
There were only so many quaint town squares and steep cobbled alleyways we wanted to see, especially in temperatures hitting 39°C (102°F). 🔥🥵 So we decided to shake things up by spending one night within the medieval castle of Óbidos, and one night in a countryside villa outside of Leiria. 🏰🦌
A big thanks to Denny for being the perfect partner in adventure and silliness over the last 4 weeks. It’s time to pack up and return to Shanghai: to the gym, the hairdresser, and the couch. 🛋️😌
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A Compact Tour of Malta & Gozo
Our Maltese adventure is at an end. Malta is the world’s 10th smallest country, and everything about it is compact: compact land-mass; compact streets; compact cars. We hired one of them and zipped around from place to place, and all on one tank of petrol. 🚗
It’s convenient that English is one of the official languages of Malta, because the Maltese language is pretty impenetrable. Everyone, don’t forget to dot your Ġs and cross your Ħs… 🤷♂️ There are more than 360 churches here, which means there’s one church for every 1,000 residents. ⛪️ But you’ll be happy to know that I didn’t include too many of them in this video compilation.
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Bohemia & Vienna
I couldn’t have hoped for a better birthday, at the end of a great week that family Fuchs/Fox/Lindsey/Newell will remember for many years to come.
We were expecting the discomfort of an August heatwave, and hordes of tourists. Instead we had a surprising amount of rain, but relatively empty streets. So I guess it worked out OK on balance..? ☔️⚖️🤷♂️ Maybe the proof is in the video watching.
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London Homecoming
Don’t wait until the next wedding, or the next funeral. We can always make the effort to meet each other, simply to show that we value the connection we have with one another. 👫
After four years away, this was by far the best of all London homecomings. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person in these photos who had been feeling nervous about seeing each other again. We’ve all become so adult, so independent. So concerned with our own family units, our own problems. But in the end it took just one afternoon to forget about the years apart, and to get back to making new memories together. 🥰
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Touchdown Tokyo!
東京にタッチダウン🗼‼️
Touchdown Tokyo!
I’m back in the country where my love affair with Asia first started back in 1999. 😳
And what better way to spend the day than people-watching in Shinagawa, kaiten-sushi in Shinjuku, scramble-crossing in Shibuya, and a coffee date in Akasaka with the beautiful Sonya Ito. 💜👫💜
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Eighteen Days in California
The theme of our California trip has been: over-stimulation.
We spent most of 2022 under a bit of a cloud. Despite everything, we’ve managed to keep happy for the most part. But maybe it’s been the kind of happiness that requires a lot of effort, and a sprinkling of self-delusion. So to be thrust out into the elements of California has been an assault to the senses. Speaking for myself, people would have either met an excited bouncing clown (usually soaked in gin, let’s be honest), or a confused mole-man who has recently been introduced to society and clearly needs to do more work on their social skills. But it has been our mission to jam in as much into the last three weeks as we have lacked these last three years. Mission accomplished.
We now begin our return to Shanghai. And we have been re-introduced to a feeling that we have missed these last few years: being happy to come back to our home. We live a comfortable, privileged life and we enjoy the adventure of being in a place that challenges us every single day. But we also know what we are missing by living on the other side of the world to so many family and friends. So a massive thank you to everyone who we met for a brief time on this trip. I am one happy clown/mole-man. 🤡🐀
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I’m So Sorry, Bugs Bunny
As part of a Mosaic of China podcast recording in Chengdu back in early March 2022, I was told by my delightful guest that 300 million rabbit heads are eaten in Sichuan Province every year. So I figured… I should at least try it once.
I’m so sorry, Bugs Bunny. 😵🐰
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An Unexplored Corner of Yunnan Province
We explored a part of Yunnan Province that’s not often visited by international tourists. In all eight years of living in mainland China, we’ve never heard stunned exclamations of “老外! [lǎowài - foreigner]” as often as in the last six days. 😮😯
Things to watch out for in the vid:
👨🍳 Sexy butcher
🪷 Lotus season in Yunnan
🇫🇷 French Indochina railway architecture
🧺 Massive fishing basket
🛕 China’s answer to Gaudi
🐴 Working horses, in a village without cars
⛩ The 2nd-largest Confucian temple in China
🍚 Red rice, which is only grown in this region
🇲🇳 Mongolian village 2000km south of Mongolia
👨✈️ Communist cosplay
🐘 ‘Elephant Tusk’ local vegetable
👩🌾 The Hani, one of 25 Yunnan ethnic minorities
💦 Slow-motion splashing
👨🍳 Did I mention the sexy butcher?
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All the Feline Feels
You may have heard reports that Shanghai has ‘opened up’ following its harsh citywide lockdown. Let me quickly explain what this means.
There is a patchwork quilt of realities. Some lucky people have indeed already received 临时出入证 (temporary exit/entry passes), allowing them to leave their compounds, usually for a short time once a day. Others have been allowed out, only for that permission to be immediately revoked once some unknown local official begins to feel nervous about the optics of people exercising their right to freedom. And for residents whose compounds remain in total lockdown, they have the exotic torture of being congratulated on their freedom while sitting under continued house arrest.
In our case, the local neighbourhood committee has opened the lock on our gate, but has not removed it. So it continues to hang ominously, silently proclaiming: “We can easily lock you up again, whenever we want”. We haven’t received any official passes, so our notion of freedom is entirely synthetic. But we took the chance to take an unofficial walk around the block, and the cat in the window of this local pet-shop sums up our emotional longing all too accurately.
The logical interpretation of an open lock is that it’s a ‘hopeful sign’. Maybe it is, and maybe we will receive our official 临时出入证 soon. With no residents in our compound testing positive for COVID-19 in all 64 days of lockdown, we’ve been conditioned to not seeing any correlation between hopeful signs and happy outcomes. And for the time being, shops, restaurants, and even parks all remain closed. So the best case scenario is that we can visit this cat through the glass again tomorrow. 🐈🪟
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Inner Mongolia & Ningxia
I would just like to say something categorical. I’m D.O.N.E. with this whole ‘living through history’ nonsense. "May you live in interesting times"? May you kiss my sweaty ass.
I’m sorry, I know there are many people who have had a truly awful time. Which is why I have allowed myself just this one privileged tantrum in 18 months.
I still can’t re-enter China on my visa if I leave, and there’s no end in sight. So we escaped Shanghai again to give me another sanity reset. Normal service will resume shortly.
Inner Mongolia 内蒙古 and Ningxia 宁夏 are both areas of China where minority cultures struggle for authentic representation. But we did our best to find it!
Hope you like the compilation video.
☀️🛖 🏞🐴🍷
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Minority Report
6 Days in Guizhou Province. 🚐🌦🌾
Note 1: We did a village-hopping tour in the ethnically diverse region of South-East Guizhou 贵州.
Note 2: This area is one of the wettest and hilliest parts of China. The geology is mostly porous limestone karst, so landslides are common. It was hot and humid, but we were incredibly lucky not to encounter much rain.
Note 3: There are very few young adults in this video, because many of them have left to become migrant workers in bigger cities around China.
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