Around the World #33: Morgan McKinnon

My guest today is Morgan McKinnon. She has been living in Beijing for over four years. We talked a lot about expectations versus reality in moving to China, and some of the great and not-so-great aspects of living here. One of Morgan's many messages is that you have to keep challenging yourself. Following her own advice, she'll move to Morocco next school year, where she'll start the next chapter of her life.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Morgan McKinnon:

Download this Episode (right-click and choose “save as”)

Morgan has set up a Go Fund Me page to help raise funds for her upcoming surgery. If you are interested in donating, click here.

Show notes:

• This frugal blogger met a couple who spent $30,000 eating at restaurants last year. He tells their story in the article.
• Here is how your FICO credit score is calculated. They give a high-level overview, but the nitty gritty details remain a mystery.
• Here's an article with pictures of men baring their bellies in Beijing.
• There are many websites dedicated to showing pictures of funny English signs in China. Here is one of them. I would've found these signs a lot more funny before I moved to China. But now, not so much. I can read a bit of Chinese, so I can see how most of the bad translations happened. And I see these signs so often, they've become normal. “Fuck the duck until exploded” is among the many “gems” on this site that are now just “meh” to me.
• The “fatberg” problem we talked about is worse than I thought. It turns out whole world's sewers are in trouble.
• If you can't read Chinese, then Ctrip is arguably the easiest way to book train tickets in China. Check out the new unofficial jingle Morgan created for them during the show!
• Or if you're feeling brave and want the cheapest price, you can try the official website for booking tickets, 12306. Only available in Chinese.
• Here's how to do a hook turn in Melbourne:
  

Here are some of my pics from Beijing:

Click for more photos from Beijing

And here are some pics from camping on the Great Wall. We'll probably get back to the Wall this spring.

Finally here some more of my Great Wall photos