Tag: Lindsey Dawson

Do you think of huge, bustling Beijing as a city with eco lodges at its doorstep?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

We've got a new gizmo at our place - something that converts old 35mm slides and negatives to digital format. Genius!

Whatever happened to water skiing? I've lived by the sea a good long time now and in years past water skiers...

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.