Beijing Health Exam (for work and student visas)

on September 5, 2012
If you’ve only been in China on a tourist visa and have never gotten to experience the health exam, then you’re missing out. The last time Kara and I had to do it was 2008 when we first got here, but since we’re on new visas now we just got to experience it again.  A [...]

Happy Crafting

on November 23, 2011
As Americans, we are about to celebrate Thanksgiving. We have so much to be thankful for this year, and the food we can anticipate at tomorrow’s dinner is at the top of that list right now. But another great thing about Thanksgiving is that, in our house, it signals the beginning of the Christmas season, [...]

Coffee Shop Review: Rickshaw Roasters Edition

on September 19, 2011
 Well I have good news and bad news. The good news is I’ve just recently connected with a great new roaster in Beijing called Rickshaw Roasters. Leo and Matt are a couple of guys from New Zealand who found the Aizai Cafe through the blog and stopped by the other day to try to convince [...]

The Middle Kingdom and Money

on August 4, 2011
We hit a couple a cool milestones with The Middle Kingdom blog last week, all centered around the number 100. First we broke 100 unique vistors in a day, secondly we now have a hundred email subscribers, and third we also have over a hundred RSS feed subscribers. Since we hit these number recently I [...]

Chinese Visas Explained

on July 29, 2011
My church back home in the States once organized a youth group trip to Brazil. They gave each family a checklist of what they needed to do before their kid could go on the trip. Get the proper immunizations, get yourself a passport if you don’t already have one and apply for a visa. One [...]

Ask An Expat: Verizon phone, drinking water and English teaching jobs

on July 26, 2011
Today’s question comes from Karl.  Matt and Kara, In five weeks, I will be flying to Beijing, for a stay of 2-4 months (length depending on whether or not I can find work teaching English and convert my tourist visa to a work visa).  So the recent issuance of your “Newcomers’s Guide” was very timely for [...]

Happy Birthday Middle Kingdom! 1 Year and Counting

on June 1, 2011
One year ago Kara and I launched the Middle Kingdom blog. We had found that there were a lot of China blogs chronicling people’s lives and experience in China, there were blogs about politics and economics and even law, there were Chinese language blogs, and there are blogs about the Beijing bar, club and music [...]

Beijing Coffee Review (Lido area): Maan Coffee, Element Fresh and Aizai Cafe

on May 16, 2011
This is my second post on Beijing coffee shops, a couple months ago I wrote another post about coffee in Beijing. Kara and I live in WangJing and we often find ourselves in the Lido area (Lido is a hotel just northeast of 4th ring road, and has been a long time foreigner hub). The [...]

3 Reasons Why Moving to China Might Be Good for Your Finances

on March 1, 2011
Recently one of the non-China related blogs that I read (Get Rich Slowly) had a great post on how to save money by leaving the country. It has some great points about why living overseas can be a really good financial choice. Kara and I moved to Beijing in March of 2008. Beijing has been [...]

7 Questions: Should We Move to Beijing?

on January 28, 2011
As our readership at the Middle Kingdom has grown, we’ve discovered that many people find our blog while they are in the midst of trying to decide whether or not to move to Beijing. This past week I’ve received emails from two different people asking for advice or information about Beijing in preparation for possibly [...]
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