Green vs. a spendthrift shade: analyzing the eco-resort trend

Let's serve up a hypothetical situation: While out grocery shopping, you see a sizable person trying to shuffle his/her way down a cramped frozen food aisle. There after, you take a second look at the gallon of double dutch ice cream (with extra marshmallows) in your hand, and then a cursory look at the calories …

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Myanmar’s détente makes travel easier

Poorly pasted together and full of pixelated photographs, my Myanmar Lonely Planet has been following me forlornly ever since I picked it up some four years ago from a child book hawker in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Besides my China LP (covered in brown paper to hide its entry from Chinese customs), it stood alone on …

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Who are the waitresses at Pyongyang restaurants in Shanghai?

Recently I've been fixated with totalitarian regimes, and it's beginning to show in my work. Today I published a piece titled "The odd reality behind Shanghai's Pyongyang restaurants" for CNNGo in which I discovered that waitresses of the three North Korean-government run Pyongyang restaurants in Shanghai have no clue of each others' existence. Like the …

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Malaysia’s Ramadan Bazaars

I passed the closing hours of Ramadan last week in Jakarta, where the indefatigable prayers of imams tolled out from loudspeakers mounted on minarets nonstop into the night at such a pitch that they continuously jarred me out of sleep. Back in Kuala Lumpur, the final prayers of the season rung out until 11 or …

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Overdeveloping China creates speculation and elitist markets

With all the huffing, puffing, moaning and yelping about international debt crises, one has got ask how China is maintaining its frantic "building binge." Today, the GlobalPost published my analysis of the current infrastructure and property development problems in China, notably in urban centers such as Shanghai and Chongqing. This story began its life during …

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