There are a lot of us travelers out there who would like to believe that we aren’t Tourists. Tourists are loud and ignorant and don’t care if they are; they don’t try to learn basic phrases of the local language; they snub the local food, and maybe they only see a fabled Local from the [...]

Perhaps when you hear “Bangkok,” you think of sprawling, bustling urbanity. Perhaps you think of up-and-coming metropolitan glamour, of shopping and nightlife. Maybe you think of massages, culinary delights, criminal exchange rates, and sexual puns. That’s all fine. Let me tell you what you’ll really do if you come to Bangkok.
Lean in close; it’s a [...]

Life is hard when you’re on vacation in Malaysia.
First, you cannot find the motivation to put up another blog post. You also cannot live up to the one that preceded it.

There are a lot of other restrictions on what you can do in Penang.

Even in the winter, it’s too hot to wear a lot of [...]

It’s always tough to prioritize travel dreams, because if you handed me a ticket to anywhere, I’d go without hesitation. But a few times over my years of conversations with other wanderers, I’ve been asked the top five places I want to go. India has always held a place on the list.
Sunday, our last in [...]

Travel is all about doing new things, meeting people you never knew existed, seeing things you’d never even thought of. People, I have had a Kuala Lumpur revelation: I have seen fresh baby corn. For real! Who knew that stuff didn’t naturally grow in cans? Not I!

Kuala Lumpur is not, in my opinion, a special [...]

If the question “Where has ellis gone for her 5-week adventure?” has been plaguing you since I mentioned it a few days ago, well, your day of respite has come. Unless I told you. Or you saw my update on Facebook, which I can, for better or worse, access for the trip’s duration. So, where [...]

From what I hear, love is a complicated thing. I haven’t had the fortune (or misfortune?) of being in actual love, though I hope I haven’t missed the boat at my old age. Especially when one is not in love with anyone, it can be tough, or even sickening, to be around two people who [...]

Life tends to have modes of interesting and same-old-same-old. For the past few weeks, my life has moved out of the former and into the latter. When my life is in s-o-s-o mode, there’s not a lot to write about on a blog, unless you’d like to hear about grading 200 final exams and watching [...]

And here I was thinking there was nothing Jewish in Huzhou.

I was just looking in the wrong aisle!

The Jew’s Ear includes protein, iron, calcium, phosphorous, vitamins, vegetable collagen, as well as many kinds of amino acids. This product was made from Auricularia Auricula-judae (Jew’s Ear) fetched from its ecological environment in the polar forest [...]

Chinese people like to compare Christmas to Spring Festival, the Lunar New Year, the Chinese Holiday of holidays. Over Spring Festival, big cities are abandoned as people go home to see their families. Even in Beijing, which is renowned for its abysmal traffic, the streets are empty. All over the country businesses close, train [...]