Street Talks and Travel Philosophy

Aug 10, 2025 8:21 am

This Week: Street Talks and Travel Philosophy

A simple week, with a question about what you would need to see in order to consider yourself to “have seen” a city and a little bit of a walk around the neighbourhood during a live stream.

🎵Listen to the latest podcast episode

Available on Libsyn, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube

🎥 This Week's Videos

🚶 Let's walk n talk on the streets of Beijing - Setting up a live stream to chat about life in China, teaching ESL, learning Mandarin, and whatever else comes up. 👉 Watch here
🏙️ What do you have to see? - Standing in Melbourne's CBD, asking the big question: what does it really take to experience a city? 👉 Watch here
🏫 Top 10 Tips for IELTS

🏙️ What do you have to see?

Shot in front of the exhibition hall at the Melbourne Museum, this little video asks a simple question: what do you need to see or experience in order to consider yourself to have seen a place?

More often than you’ll be able to count, when you mention that you’re going to a certain place people will tell you that you MUST see this or you MUST go there.

But, do you have to? What about what you want to do?

After all of your research is done and you’re actually in the place you wanted to go, what would you need to see, do, eat or smell in order to consider you have seen and experienced the place? Is it going to a pub? Eating a certain type of food? Meeting some “locals”? Seeing the sites?

And I guess a follow up question would be: how long do you stay? Can you get that all done in a day or two if you have to? Or is there an optimal amount of time to go?

And this, of course, is to say nothing of the fact that some people like visiting cities, other people prefer to avoid them.

What do you like to see and do when travelling? And for how long?

👉 Watch the full video

🚶 Let's walk n talk on the streets of Beijing

In a neat little experiment this week (and because the renovation drills were still a pounding away), I decided to take the live stream to the streets.

Surprisingly, quite a few people joined in. Maybe this can be a new thing to do?

To be honest, it would be far easier to simply live stream rather than shoot and cut up videos all the time, a thing I can’t say I really enjoy (it’s why I hired a video editor and she has done a phenomenal job).

The problem, however, is that the internet connection here in China doesn’t always work for a variety of reasons. Since being here for a while, I’ve learned to deal with it as best as I can, but when you’ve scheduled a “meeting” and can’t connect, what are you to do?

Anyway, it worked this time and I was glad that people popped in to ask questions. It sounded as if there were quite a few people who had never seen the channel before and so they were asking about what China is like.

Several topics were covered, including food delivery, changes in the neighbourhood, learning Chinese, Western-style pastry shops in Beijing (Weiduome and Holliland), and a cautionary tale of imbibing baijiu.

We also tried to read some Chinese characters… with varying amounts of success.

Left: 自由平等 (Freedom and equality); Right: 文明和谐 (Civilization and harmony)

Left: Lettering on a small community gate 同心建设文明城 (Tóngxīn jiànshè wénmíng chéng), “With one heart to construct a civilized city” (I think);

Right: Sign written in chalk within the compound

If the internet holds up, this might be something I do more often. What do you think?

👉 Watch the full video

📚 Top 10 Tips for IELTS

Just a reminder that if you or someone you know is preparing for the IELTS test (or any English language test), get them to download this document as it’s very helpful in focusing on what’s necessary for the test.

It’s free and I’ve been told by several people that it is SPOT ON! So, download it, get in touch, and let’s work together.

👉 DOWNLOAD HERE

Oh, and if you would rather me read this document to you, you can find that at THIS YOUTUBE LINK.

We'll leave it there for this week. Thanks for reading. I hope you found this useful.