Yea, luckily so many other great ones. I’m really into Chongqing myself.

Great to hear about Kunming, I always hear good things and like the cooler weather myself, but I haven’t yet been or know anyone there. It’ll be fun. Do the weed grandmas still sell weed there? I don’t smoke, but that always sounded so funny to me.

Me too, good luck and feel free to post or just reach out and let me know because I’ll be very curious to see if they fixed those anomalies for you. It’s so much fun being back here I think I’m going to go down to Yunnan or something in the future.

The problem with Beijing is def still the smog, although my friends are telling me that it has been getting much better and I basically just am visiting during the worst week of smog they’ve seen all year.

Yea, the new payment systems and everything. Which is still going well, btw: I’ve registered with the city bus, subway, and made about 50 transactions across the city at every level of store, vendor and restaurant.

Beijing, popping around the city to see different friends from ye ol English teaching days.

10 days visa free travel for a lot of countries plus payment integration with foreign credit cards, it hasn’t been easier in modern history to visit mainland china than it is this year.

More dishes coming up on the community, I’m sure.

Rome’s been there a while, I expect it to be there a while longer. you’ll have your chance!

i love that numb feeling, but I understand it can get pretty intense. There was this one shop I always ordered extra 麻 at, and one time I had to literally stop eating my 蒜薹腊肉 for five minutes because my throat was closing up with all the 麻胶 I was eating. Finished the plate after my brief respite, of course.

Dang I have to go look for a 腊肉 restaurant next.

ha, that’s a good question, I imagined I was the greedy frog for eating so much frog; that is a BIG ol’ bowl of delicious.

chinese food really does things different.

that Sichuan peppercorn in the center is fresh too, rather than dried, which surprised me. I’m not sure if I’ve had it fresh before, but there’s still a little rind with a very interesting fresh pepper flavor around the crunchy numbing center.

I appreciate that, thanks. There are so many fascinating sights and locations that don’t need any ornament. Rome’s a great example. The Colosseum and churches are very cool of course, but the aqueduct park is without pomp and circumstance, a massive park with the enormous, original columns and arches of ancient Roman aqueducts open to the public. You can walk right up and touch them and climb up and sit on some of the support columns that have fallen down. The ancient infrastructure is sitting and standing there in a giant park that anyone can go see and interact with. The Appian way still has many original stones to it too, all the good cafes and handmade gelato are down little alleys, the Sicilian coast itself was breathtaking, there’s so much to see and do that we don’t have to wait in line or buy tickets for.

I’ve only heard amazing things about Barcelona but haven’t been there myself yet, feel free to post and let us know how things go when you make it there.

I’m really curious what it was like prior to mid-century post-war reform, I want to see a companion article with just the agrarian lifestyle and interesting cultural history and artifacts.

Isn’t that the most bizarre wonder? every single person who’d been told me that it’s the best in the world in Morocco and I was like how is that even a thing?

But once you’re in Morocco and try the orange juice you’re like oh shit here we go.

Pretty good claim to fame, congratulations Morocco.

Wasnt that fascinating? I’m a little way too spoiled by my comforts for that kind of life but it’s really impressive and inspiring.

I also really liked the layout and the pictures, they made for a very engaging article.

If you only had the US or China to choose from, and both have pleeeenty of problems, at least in China you have access to high-quality affordable housing/healthcare/education/other cultures, good food, etc, but there are another 200ish countries you can choose from, and most of them are going to offer a better deal than the US does to its residents. Thailand’s always near the top of the list, Medellin is very nice, I’m really into Busan now; you have lots of good options.

Ha, I never heard about that, but I haven’t made it to Spain yet. yikes! Have you ordered it?

Certainly not after the first

Okay, thanks, i was talking to a couple foreigners a couple hours ago, I’ll try to compare notes next time and see if anyone is still having those kinds of payment problems. maybe it’s a different city thing.

silver lining of the authoritarianism and surveillance is that china is incredibly safe, and on the street level, chinese people like their comforts, plus their food is amaaaazing, so it’s generally a pretty good time. Both China and Taiwan speak Mandarin, although Taiwan pronunciation is much more clear and standardized than Chinese Mandarin, so you’ll still have a little bit of a leg up if you decide to visit. Beijing is just gray though, if it wasn’t for my Beijing friends I would be in Chongqing or Dali or somewhere with cleaner air.

Overall though, China is a wildly comfortable place to live. It would be the easiest thing to just stay here and luxuriate in the comfort and convenience of instant deliveries and the cheapest electronics, super safe neighborhoods, cheapest groceries, amazing mountains and natural landscapes, head massages! And a million things to learn every day.

Yea, it’s pretty cool. There are actually a lot of specific stores in China that are also very common. Like snack stores, so you can buy a single piece of beef jerky or duck neck or dried mango in a little packet, and there are maybe 400 different little packets of all kinds of snacks organized in little open drawers, and you throw each bite into your basket and then bring all the packets up and instead of having to buy a big pack of one thing you can get a grab bag of twenty different tiny snacks for the same price. And the beer is always crazy cheap there too, since a lot of these are savory beer snacks.

There’s so much that’s interesting here, it’s really fun to be back.

Yea, they’re all called 果果…, so if you see a shop called 果果-something in China, chances are that’s it’s a fruit-only grocery store. I’m not sure why, but China has shops and stores that exclusively sell fruit, and they’re very common.

Oh wait, not fruit-specific as in one type of fruit, is that what you mean? It’s still somewhat remarkable that even though every supermarket and many smaller stores have fruit, there are still tons of shops in China that only sell fruit. I always found that interesting, but everyone in China just shrugs when I ask them why and says “fruit is good” or some equivalent as the reason for the abundance of fruit-only stores.