The travels of Justin

I ate delicious french bread with cheese and garlic from a local bakery near where I’m staying. The croissants actually taste like croissants, unlike Tianjin where bakeries use oil instead of butter to make their product look like the foreign and exotic croissant, but the flavour isn’t the same. On a street corner — far [...]

Despite my best efforts, it seems almost impossible to find out what my options are for housing on campus while most people are on vacation during the summer holiday. Since progress is at a standstill, I’m going to cool off and enjoy some dark German beer in Shanghai with my Swabian friend. In the meantime, [...]

My first photos of Nanchang are available for public consumption. Enjoy! 湖滨公园 (Park and lake near the north campus)

“That’s China of the 1980′s,” says the man sharing my train compartment as the train slows to enter Nanchang City (南昌市). Easily spotting the red maple leaf I met Mr. Yan, a Nanchang student who spent 3-months in TRU as an enchange student and was kind enough to be my first contact at 6 AM [...]

I’m helping out at an education expo in Beijing this weekend. I couldn’t believe that I was greeted outside the expo centre by scalpers selling tickets. “我有” (I have), is my reply, but one guy keep trying assuming that I am brushing him off instinctually. Once he realizes that I’m actually speaking Chinese with a [...]

I left Dalian a few days ago to meet a train traveling from Beijing to Nanchang. I learned that — for reasons beyond my understanding — it is impossible to buy a train ticket for a Beijing train from anywhere outside the capital. A friend who happend to be visiting Beijing purchased the ticket for [...]