bhemak's VirtualTourist Home Page

After teaching English and China, learning Chinese in China, and a good chunk of travel in China, Pakistan, and Turkey, I am looking for some international work. I'm close to being placed with MSF (Medicins sans Frontieres), but it might not happen. I'm presently in Minnesota and starting conversations about what Biafra really means and why East Asians don't need to eat dairy, but I'm usually met with blank stares and then the conversation changes to who got married or what's going on in the NBA.

Now you may notice that some of places you've been (or live) are ones I've been to. You may notice further that some places that you like are ones I'm not fond of. While I am always glad to travel some place new, I sometime realize I'm not fond of a place when I get back home. Please don't take it personally, it is just one persons opinion, and I may be completely wrong. I hope that you find my opinion useful, if not ignore my information.

Thanks and enjoy.

If you search around my pages, you will keep seeing 'my former home town.' This is not a joke, I've really moved around a lot. At last count, twelve metropolitan areas (so I won't include intra-ctiy moves). That is seven in the US and now five abroad. Chronologically it is : Seattle, Denver, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Tucson, Silver City (NM), greater LA, then two small towns in China (Yichuan, and Yanshi), Zhengzhou in China, then Kunming, China and sort of Olympus in Turkey.

So a valid question is which one is my 'real' home. Some say home is where you heart is or they say home is where you hang your hat. I'd go with a little from column A and a little from column B (name the TV show reference). So my home is some equal mix of China as an amalgam (rit changed my thinking), LA (the last American one), Tucson (college and it friends), and Minneapolis (family and childhood nostalgia). The rest I was at too little or too long ago.

I count living as any place where: a) I am for more than a week, b) Where I have all of my stuff, and c) I am employed or studying. All ten locales qualify. This list will probably increase during my life.

Watch and enjoy.

I saw an other VTer with a top list of places they like and it seems like a good idea, so I ripped it off. Someday I may have complete pages for all of these. These are my favorite to either live in or visit:


1) Los Angeles
2) Las Vegas
3) Bangkok
4) Minneapolis
5) Angkor Wat (in Cambodia)
6) Kaula Lumpur
7) Luoyang (in China)
8) Bukit Lawang (In Sumatra, Indonesia)
9) Tucson
10) Shanghai

If you see that I've listed a place as somewhere I've been, but don't have a good page (or any page) for it let me know. With a little encouragement I will gladly create a page knowing that there is a huge demand for it (read: demand of one person).

This is a list of random words:

parallax
blue corn tortilla chips
el pollo del mar
Laser Video Disc
antipodean
nutty
Velcro
traipse