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lindsey dawson articles
Massages, dance lessons, art auctions, cooking lessons, tai chi, wine tasting, yoga, shopping, facials... you can imagine the delights.
If you're going to try the most famous Chinese dish in the world, then what better place to go than the place that keeps on winning awards for the best Peking Duck in Peking?
When even our kids can't ride a bike without a helmet, the wind-in-hair sensation is a feeling they'll never know. For grown-ups it's just a memory.
Fast Train from Shanghai to Beijing
After I got back from China people kept asking, 'So how was it on the train?' I went by rail from Shanghai to Beijing. One of the world's fastest, the train rips along at around 300kph though is capable of even more.
Best to take a half-empty suitcase if you visit Shanghai. The shopping is vast and varied, from to the very best brands in the world to fake knock-offs you can bargain hard for.
You know you're in for a different sort of dining experience when the place supplies disposable plastic gloves. We've come up steep, narrow stairs to a tiny box of a restaurant lined with white plastic walls.
Do you think of huge, bustling Beijing as a city with eco lodges at its doorstep?
When you're a tourist it's hard to get in amongst the lives of people in other countries. You see them hurrying about on their daily round but there are few glimpses of their quieter times.
Why China Should Be on your to-Do List
It's easy to think of reasons why China might not be on your places-to-see list. It's so big and so foreign, huh? All those vast cities, language you don't understand, food you might not warm to?
The vampires of the Twilight saga saturated modern media for a while, but now they've been booted out by the warriors of The Hunger Games, in which young people in an imaginary society not too removed from our own are selected to fight to the death.
I love delving into old newspapers to find ancestor stories. Motivated largely by that old saying, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, I'm digging up tales from yesterday that still speak to us today.
Oh yes, tobacco fans, you can feel free to light up anywhere in China. And before you say 'eeeuw', imagine this. It's a steamy evening in Shanghai on the famous esplanade knows as the Bund.
We've got a new gizmo at our place - something that converts old 35mm slides and negatives to digital format. Genius!
When I wrote about the glamour years at Pan Am (the airline) recently someone pointed me to the great old planes you can see at Motat, Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology.
Out of America's TV factory comes the latest hot show, Pan Am, inspired by that long-ago time in aviation when flying was glamorous and people dressed up to get on a plane.
Auckland was a humming town in 1880s. Your ancestors flirted and laughed and gossiped when they weren't being outraged and appalled. Some things were just too "utterly utter", as they used to say back then.
Imagine the excitement in Auckland 126 years ago as Woodyear's Electric Circus unloaded piles of crates onto the wharf downtown and got ready to stage its latest spectacular.
Isn't it great that there's never any shortage of new passions to get stuck into? These days I'm powerfully drawn to genealogy, heritage, legacy… all those good words that indicate a readiness to get a better grip on the life we've all been living for, we
There's absolutely no knowing what new trend is about to pop up in the world. Take yarn bombing, for instance. If, like me, you've never heard of it before, it's a subversive new form of knitting.
In my mum's day, neighbours used to swap recipes over the fence. Keen cooks are launching blogs, taking their own photos of their lovely dishes, and sharing their creations with the world. I love it.
Write Your Life Story (The Video)
I'm having such fun online with a cool tool you can find at www.animoto.com All you do is gather some pictures and brief video clips, add some text, choose a background theme, pick some music, arrange it all in the order you want, and send it to Animoto.
Once it was only experts could create movies, radio shows and books. Now, with some help from the web, you too can be your own movie director, broadcaster and publisher.
You know how it is when the friendly waitperson offers the dessert menu - and everyone hesitates? No-one wants to be first to mutter, "Oh, go on then", even if you are secretly hanging out for crème brûlée or chocolate mud cake. Or pudding. Yay, pudding!
I was shocked recently to come across a website that could calculate for me in a second how many days I've been alive. For me, it's more than 23 thousand days.
My friend writer Helen Brown lost her iPhone. Quel bereavement! Because she was on holiday at Byron Bay and was just about to pack up and leave, there was no chance of it turning up under a cushion as might have happened at home.
've been obsessed with genealogy all summer. Never got around to it before but the internet makes it so very easy and fascinating.
With great hair, perfect makeup and huge CVs, they're the world's new powerful females. But forget tired old feminist notions. This lot still want to change things, but differently - via conscious evolution.
Are we witnessing the decline and fall of our civilization? Sometimes, when I look at TV, I think so.
It seems like such a short time ago that we were all hyped up over the end of the 90s. The new millennium was coming! A brave new age!
Courtesy of Lindsey Dawson.Oh, such care people are taking not to offend. So fragile have we become. How thin our skins ...
The words 'red' and 'cake' don't really go together in my mind, so I was intrigued to see a story about some big dinner attended by political star Sarah Palin where the menu largely consisted of 'thick slices of roast pork and red velvet cake'.
Courtesy of Lindsey Dawson.I guess the time may come for all of us to get to the grumpy old woman (or man) ......
I'm writing a new novel set around 1880 and the more I read letters from that era that end in flourishing signatures, preceded by phrases like "yours very truly", the harder it is to wrench myself back into today.
Once it was acronyms that drove us nuts. Well, they still do. I'm forever stumbling over clumps of letters that mean nothing to me. Now we're also being faced with the challenge of understanding itty-bitty letters.
The newspaper paragraph that slayed me lately was the one in which writer and satirist P J O'Rourke admitted to not being able to "work a computer".
Newspapers keep dying. It's like watching a part of civilization sputtering and going dark. Mostly it's happening in America. The latest was the 146-year-old 'Seattle Post-Intelligencer'. Before that, Denver's 'Rocky Mountain News' shut its doors.
It's the time of year for flies and other pesky critters in our homes. But we harbour them in our hearts and minds as well. Here's one to beware of, The Fear Fly.
High Altitude Harbingers of Change
The 'Trillion Dollar Bailout Ride'. I wore shoes like this when I was about 18. I remember red ones with a bow on the front, just like this sketch of mine.
Silver Bullets Flying All Over
Have we ever heard so much about silver bullets as in recent times? Not that anyone is being over-optimistic about the power of the famed SB... far from it.
Thai Fish Cakes with a Cucumber Relish
Ingredients: 300gms of fish cut into chunks (I use cod which makes these Fish Cakes nice and soft) 2 tbls of ....
A Pilot Yearns for the Way Things Were
There's lots of bad news out there and, conversely, lots of hopeful talk as well. You hear many 'experts' saying things will get worse, and just as many saying things will get better. Who knows which way it'll go.
It's a Slippery, Scintillating World
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by the web? Well, take a deep breath. You ain't seen nothin' yet.
GM Splutters and Gold Gets a Glow On
October 10, General Motors shares in America fell to the same price as they were at in 1950.
}A strange and confusing story about the sun appeared on the New Zealand Herald's front page on October 1.
In a TIME magazine list of the top 10 graphic novels for last year, I found this picture of the number three book on the list, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. It's Superman, but not as we know him.
Lindsey Dawson - Undone By Love
It's so interesting how time forges and mellows our characters. For evidence look no further than May 17's Herald on Sunday and the next day's Sunday Star Times. Paul Holmes writes for the first; Michael Laws for the other.
Lindsey Dawson - Turning Wheels
I've been delving back into the 1990s. An editor asked me to write a story about that decade and so I spent days ploughing back through pages of the mags I edited during those years
Come Back, McPhail & Gadsby, We Need You!
There's an election going on. But where's the noise, where's the humour?
The First Wives Club From Hell
New Zealand TV channels don't do overseas news until about 25 minutes into the news hour because they're so stuck on the idea that viewers like local news best. The only time that changes is when the world is falling apart.
Whatever happened to water skiing? I've lived by the sea a good long time now and in years past water skiers...
Lindsey Dawson - Santa's Big Fat Carbon Footprint Problem
Santa had a headache, a mean and nasty one...
The Answer - a great book for Xmas...or anytime.
Feeling stressed or stuck? Here's a solution from author/editor Lindsey Dawson
Lindsey's Latest ColumnsCruising With a Purpose Fast Train from Shanghai to Beijing Peking Duck, Anyone? Ride ......
lindsey dawson discussions
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