Northern Asia

Like most of you back home in North America, we were off for the Christmas holidays…well, 2 days of it! The Chinese don’t celebrate Christmas so we were glad to actually have Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off. In all honestly, I don’t think we would have had those 2 days as holidays had they not ...

While travelling around China and now living here for the past 5 months, we’ve seen some strange things on the menu. Sometimes they make us laugh, sometimes they make us worry, but they’re always entertaining. If a Chinese restaurant owner decides to try to create an English menu, it makes for a very funny read. ...

The City of Yangzhou is set alongside many canals and has some beautiful parks, gardens and a great Old Town.  There are many nearby cities that can be easily explored on a weekend – Suzhou, Wuxi and Nanjing to name a few.  The sprawling metropolis of Shanghai is only 1.5 hours by train, which makes for a ...

After travelling the world for 16 months, we weren’t ready to go home and settle down, but we needed a bit of a break from backpacking.  Making the decision to move to Yangzhou, China and sign a 1 year contract teaching English was a no-brainer for us.  After backpacking through this massive country for about ...

Arriving in the ancient town of Tunxi was a breath of fresh air, literally! Backpacking in China can trying at times. Beijing and Shanghai are massive, polluted cities with populations of around 20 million people.  Tunxi is much smaller and has less than 100,000 people living there…it really felt like there was no one around. ...

We were so excited to arrive in one of the biggest cities in the world, Shanghai. Meaning “by the sea” this massive city was a popular trading port for years in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s. Shanghai is not exactly a budget backpacker’s ideal destination but it is doable on a budget. We took the ultra-modern, ...