Shanghailander.net

Arrival in Yangon (Rangoon) at night woke back many memories of other cities frozen in time. The first contact reminded me of arriving in Saigon in 1998. Same trees, same roads and mostly 1980′s Japanese 10th hand cars around. The cars falling apart with wheel on the wrong side reminded me of Cambodia in the [...]

“Territoires et populations des confins du Yunnan” is a book I bought in an antique market a couple of years ago. Published in 1931 by French Beijing-based Henri Vetch company, it was actually printed by the Commercial Press in Shanghai. The author Joseph Siguret was also the French Consul from 1926 to 1953 in Beijing [...]

Shanghailander.net blog has raised in popularity over the years and people from various places have been contacting me about it, but one of the recent most interesting encounters was through a friend of a friend. After a 2 hours conversation (originally planned for 1/2 an hour), Claire’s conclusion was “You definitely have to meet my [...]

The start of 2010 is for me the change of generation. My grand-mother Claudine Toffoletti passed away last week, at the age of 96 years. Although I have lived many years far away from her, we kept a very close relationships by letters. Email was something she had little idea about, but we wrote postal [...]

This post about the movie Casablanca is a deviation post still strongly linked to old Shanghai. The 1942 movie takes place during World War II in Europe when Jewish refugees from Central Europe were fleeing persecutions in their home countries, selling all their belongings to try and reach a safe heaven. Casablanca was a transit [...]

I did not write posts recently, going on vacation after weeks of writing slowed down by technical problems. The summer break was a great opportunity to take a step backward from life in Shanghai. My first trip was to Thailand, to relax in a Ko Samui detox resort. Shanghai hectic life comes with a price, [...]

As much as a I love Shanghai, it was not the first city I fell in love with. Getting used to the Chinese megalopolis in 2004 was actually not easy coming from the charming Central European City of Budapest. I have spent more than 5 years walking the paved streets of this XIXth century beauty. [...]