During dinner at Allah's house, Matt told me a story that took place not long after he had started working for Peace Players International.

After a basketball practice, a Palestinian player's older brother invited Matt to a bachelor party. Matt was wary of imposing but the brother insisted it would be fun. Besides, he wanted to show the American ( Read more... )

While I was feeling that special Christmas spirit that only comes from an extra Christmas paycheck and post-Christmas economic crisis sales from various nearly insolvent retailers I bought several books from the Lonely Planet ( Read more... )

Ever since I went to China I have been telling everyone I know that Chinese food and culture is all very well, but it is the minority cultures that make China so wonderful. Now there is a Chinese cookbook that highlights exactly that. Beyond the Great Wall highlights foods from the minority cultures in China.

Here is a review, and here is the ( Read more... )

Since I am moving in a little less than a week and a half I have been going through all of my stuff: packing boxes full of books, stuffing bags full of clothes, and discarding random trinkets in the trash. Yesterday I took eight bags of clothes to goodwill. I still have clothes left ( Read more... )

My favorite econo-blogger and I are now facebook friends. I suppose I'm going to have to content myself with that because I really can't stomach paying the $131.36 for his book in order to run up to Harvard to get it signed. It's really too bad that I sold it back to the bookstore after my intermediate macro class, but at the time the present value ( Read more... )

Now that I have a job I have found myself with an excess of time. At first I couldn’t imagine what to do with my surplus of time. There is television, but in classic television style, despite having some two hundred channels, there is never anything on when you can watch TV. I tried puzzling, but that’s never been my favorite pastime. I thought ( Read more... )

I finished my accounting final this morning and went to sell back my books. I only have my English final left, and most of the books are small so the resale value is small ( Read more... )

In classic Chinese fashion no one knows anything until the very last minute. The summer school course, which Ben Hillman told me would be 6 weeks is actually 4. So I could have gone home two weeks earlier. Oh well. The reason for cutting the program short is the Diqin Autonomous Prefecture's 50th Anniversary party in September. The kids are all ( Read more... )

Yesterday was wasted with travel. We left Fenghuang at 7:30 am because we had heard there was a train from Jishou to Nanchang that left at 10am. Apparently everyone in Fenghuang is misinformed because not only was there no train to Nanchang (南昌) at 10, there is not and has never been a train from Jishou to Nanchang. After some trouble we finally ( Read more... )

Some musings on China after my first week ( Read more... )