Two Bank Cards, Two Passports, One Headache Banking in China can be an Interesting Experience A few months back, I spent a little time in a hospital in Hong Kong. My health insurance is through a Hong Kong company, but it required me to pay everything up front …
Lunatic Finance How to Save Money Like a Lunatic Do you want your retirement to be at the mercy of some bureaucratic social security plan and maybe a small 401k or IRA? Even if all of those hold together, most people in most countries find themselves in for a …
Unplanned Male Pregnancy Another Crisis of Modern Times As if the world didn’t already have enough problems, the recently reported problem of unplanned male pregnancy has gone global. Now it’s reached all the way to China. Normally, male pregnancy is something that only happens to seahorses. Seahorses are used …
Glowing Fibrous Tentacles Have Invaded My Village! And one of those tentacles just reached into my house! Oh wait. Sorry if I caused any alarm. It’s just a fiber optic cable for my internet connection. When I first came to China in 2006, I got this odd wave of “goodbye” …
Christmas Pizza With Daughter One inconvenient part about Christmas not being a publicly observed holiday in China is that the schools here hold class as normal on Christmas Day. Since my beautiful daughter lives at school during the week, I wasn’t going to get to see her on Christmas day. …
Christmas, Friends, and Pizza Back when I first came to China, food was a frequent topic of conversation. One of the common questions people asked me was “Which western food do you miss the most.” I replied “I miss good pizza.” The inevitable response was something along the lines …
My Chinese Christmas Tree Although Christmas isn’t an official holiday here in China, it’s sort of observed, at least on the retail level. Shops put up Christmas trees, play endless Christmas songs (often including several different singers doing the same song in a row) are played, and the clerks …
8 years since I met my first friends in China Time flies when you’re a Lunatic. I first arrived in China on December 6, 2006 for an 8 month contract as an English teacher. Three days later, I went to my first English corner. Someone asked me about my favorite …
MilliCharity Registration 3rd Anniversary Party MilliCharity is one of Dongguan’s oldest charity groups. In 2011, it became one of the first charity groups to be registered with the government. If I understand things correctly, it was the first registered charity which hadn’t had some sort of prior government sponsorship. …
RaoulsChinaSaloon.com A Must-Visit Site for Expats in China I’ll probably get around to adding a resources or links page later on, but I wanted to get this information posted in early. If you are even thinking about joining the ranks of expats in China, there’s a site you need …
China Cultural Notes: Girls vs. Women Before I get myself in trouble with some phrasing in my other posts, I wanted to get this very important Chinese cultural detail on the record. I was emailing a very dear friend back in the states about two of my best friends …
I’ve got about a billion things to get posted, some of which I might or might not backdate to match when they happened. In the meantime, it’s November 24th 2014, and I’ve just made enough progress on the Escaped Lunatic site to get my first post in. 🙂 December 12th …