Something About Travel

I took my family for a weekend staycation, the Mandarin Oriental Shanghai, club level, all the amenities, all the special treatment. Ordinarily we might have flown to Hong Kong or Osaka or taken the high speed train to Nanjing, but that’s all off the table now and it’s not clear if, when, and in what form it’s ever coming back. The experience reminded me just how much I’ve been missing travel.

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Lushan Travel Guide

A century ago, Moganshan attracted Shanghailanders looking to escape the summer heat. They went down and built wonderful stone country homes amidst the bamboo forests which still stand – and are still famous – even today. But even before that, the same thing happened in Lushan, a lush, green-clad, cloud-wrapped mountain which sticks straight up from the north Jiangxi floodplains. Today it is a fantastic getaway which combines culture, nature, architecture and a unique political history.

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Shaoxing Digressions

Shaoxing is a magical place for me. There are a few others in China–Qingdao, Moganshan, and Xiangshan just outside Beijing. These aren’t obscure places. Many people have been there, but maybe they don’t see them the way I do. I have been to each of them many times and even after years of separation I don’t need any map to get around. Each is a separate and important thread of my China story. Previously I have written about Xiangshan. Now I want to talk about Shaoxing.

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My Japan Mlog

I don’t want to write a travelogue of Japan, but I do want to convey what it was like to travel by bicycle through this very interesting country. So what I’ve done instead is a Mlog–a music blog–which is not a word, nor even a good idea for one. What I did was Shazam tracks all around Japan at different times, whenever I heard anything that struck me. Japan, as I wrote before, is almost always perfectly soundtracked. So here’s my journey through Japan, one track at a time. I’ve imbedded Youtube video of each track, plus linked to Xiami where I could.

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[This Is Not A] Tokyo Guide

I’ve always thought of Tokyo as impenetrable in some way. Maybe because of the language barrier, maybe due to scare stories of the impossible-to-navigate Tokyo subway, maybe because of its reputation for being frightfully expensive. But really it’s one of the most sophisticated places in the world, a ton of fun, and–most interestingly–almost always perfectly soundtracked.

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