In November 2012, I’m visiting the Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terraces in Guangxi province. After a night spent in a guesthouse on one of the hills, I start a 5-hour long trek across the rice terraces to another village. I’m trekking with 3 Chinese guys who have also stayed in guesthouses on the hill. November is low […]
Category Archives: Travel stories
One day at the end of September 2013, Q, a friend who’s living in Shangri-la, has invited me to come with her to her hometown Weixi, which is located on the hills of a fertile valley in Western Yunnan and is a 5-hour-drive across steep mountain roads from Shangri-la. Weixi is a city surrounded by mountains which is […]
I’ve climbed 18 of Tiger Leaping Gorge’s 28 bends when a guy in his 40s with a horse crosses my path. While he walks by, he looks at me and says with a friendly smile: “You’re beautiful.” I’m out of breath and he comes to a halt, asking: “Do you want to ride the horse […]
I’m climbing Northern Yunnan’s Tiger Leaping Gorge. I’ve met a German and a French on the bus, and we walk up the mountain together. At one point, we come by a lonely stall high up in the mountains selling fruits and veggies. I point at some leaves and ask the woman selling these things: “What […]
Y and I are in Changchun. Changchun (literally meaning long spring) was once the capital of Manchuria, which was the name of Northeast China under Japanese occupation from 1931 to 1945. Today, it’s the capital of Jilin province and China’s biggest auto manufacturer. After lunch we set out to take a cab that will take […]
One day while travelling through my husband’s home province Jilin in July 2013, we come by a city called Tonghua. My husband’s friend is living there and my husband has promised to pay her and her mother, who is seriously ill, a visit. My phone got stolen a few days before on our train ride […]
Ever since we met, Y and I have spent every single day together. It’s hard not to when you sit right next to each other in the office. This doesn’t mean that there weren’t times when we were apart, but it was always only for so long. There was one time when Y had to […]
We take the train from Changchun in Northeast China to Shenzhen in Southeast China. Taking more than 36 hours, it’s the longest train ride for me so far. At one of the stops a woman gets on the train. She puts her luggage beneath one of the beds of the 6-bed compartment Y is sharing […]
One day in late June 2013 my husband and I visit gugu. Gugu is my father-in-law’s older sister and I like her immediately. She is an elderly woman in her late 70s who lives with her husband, son, daughter-in-law, her grandson and a few chicken and geese in the countryside of Northeast China’s Jilin province. […]
As much as I love Shenzhen with its many flowers and lots of space – when it comes to food I would trade it for Honkong without hesitation. A few years ago I entered a congee restaurant with the name Congee Wonderland in Hongkong. I became addicted to their congee and try to go there […]
One evening in July 2012 the rain drops are pounding heavily against the windows as we sit in the living room of a friend’s place in Kunming. We are happy for the rain, because in the last three years and counting Yunnan province has suffered a severe drought. We have just finished a home-cooked dinner […]
One day in Shangri-La I decide to go to the grasslands after dinner. Twilight is progressing fast, but I don’t care. This evening the seemingly unboundedness of the grasslands is exerting its pull on me, luring me into the arms of its green meadows. With every step the school buildings on the outskirts of town […]
One afternoon in June 2012 I left Chongqing for Kunming. The sky was grey and the hot summer air seemed to be lying heavily on my shoulders when I left Chongqing. I did not know what would await me when I arrived. It had been almost three years since I came to Kunming for the […]
As I enter the long-distance bus station in Guilin, a guy in his 30s asks me: “Where are you going?” Thinking that he wants to sell me a black-market ticket, I say: “I’m buying the ticket at the booth, thanks.” He asks again: “Where are you going? Guangzhou? Shenzhen?” I queue up in front of […]
Three guys who probably just turned 18 come up to me. One asks me if they can take a picture with me. I say yes, but it will cost 100 Kuai per picture. He takes out his wallet, jokingly. After taking a picture with every single one of them, he says: “May I ask you […]
One day in the June of 2012 I was sitting in a little restaurant in a mountain village a few hours from Chongqing. The plain white walls were decorated only with a print that showed Mao Zedong in the middle and politicians surrounding him. Although the village was a domestic tourist destination, the restaurant was […]
It had been two years since I had left the southwestern city of Kunming – the beautiful city of spring that had become my new home for one year of studying abroad. When I came back to China in the late spring of 2012, all I took with me was a backpack with clothes, the […]
My first trip to China was to Beijing in September 2005. I couldn’t speak a word of Chinese at that time, but I had already made up my mind to study this beautiful language. So far, my paths have led me to Beijing only twice in my life, and I remember it as a very […]
China elevator stories 