Recorded on Saturday February 20, 2021. I’ve known John for over a decade now since we met in South Korea when we both first started teaching. We were part of the same intake of ESL teachers into the South Korean government’s EPIK program that brought teachers from around the world into the country and were both sent to Busan to teach. Aside from teaching, we were both a part of the music scene in Busan, but it wasn’t until after the first year in the country that John would start his latest...

Today’s episode features Anna Bass, a lady I met just before I left for China. We were both in Montreal for a month working on our CELTAs after which I was scheduled to go to China while she was to remain in North America and start up her own business. We had a chance to catch up and talk about how things have gone since our course together. Anna isn’t just an ESL teacher. We initially got talking about movies and filmmaking during which I learned that she has several film credits to her...

Today’s guest is a running coach, personal trainer and performance enhancement specialist, Liubov got in touch through a mutual friend and wanted to share her story with how she moved to the US and changed her life for the better by doing something so simple: running. We exchanged emails a few times before we finally set a time to talk. I only found out during our talk that she hails from Ukraine so we were able to talk about that a little bit before we got into her current occupation as a...

It’s pretty common while travelling to meet some interesting “characters”. Some you want to meet again, others you wish go away and are never seen again. My guest today, Denny Goin, belongs in the former category of people who you meet and you know is a bit of a character, but not in a bad way at all. He introduced me to the idea of buying gold and that it’s even possible to move to an island in the south Pacific. Sound crazy? That’s only some of the things we talked about in this episode. I...

This week’s episode features another friend here in Beijing, Natalya Ba. She has been in China for 9 years originally to study Chinese Medicine and then stayed on to work and to study the Chinese language. **You’ll note that I make a bit of mix up with the episode numbers right at the beginning of the episode. That is because last week I actually had recorded another episode with another person but technology did not let us save that one. So, we’ve arranged to record again sometime in the...

In a manner of speaking, this episode has been twenty years in the making. Today’s episode takes me back to the time when I was a rock drummer in Winnipeg, Canada. I have with me today two friends and bandmates from that time, Steve Baria and Stephen F, who were the guys I first played with in a band that actually played somewhere other than the house. Today, after a bit of catching up between me and Stephen F, who left Winnipeg about a month before I did, and a bit of a talk about what it’s...

Had a burst of inspiration last week and reached out to a fellow Twitter-er by the name of Hikosaemon. He agreed to be on my podcast and this is the result! Hikosaemon has been in Japan for over 22 years and hosts his own news show live on YouTube every Sunday night at 10.30 pm Japan Standard Time. Other than his news show, he hosts other videos and blogs, makes his own music, and maintains a constant presence on Twitter. Today we were able to sit down and talk about life in Japan and China,...

This week I have another guest and friend from here in Beijing. He’s a self-described rather “unremarkable man” but has done something remarkable during the COVID-19 lockdown: he’s watched a lot of movies. One a day… for the last six months. Today we Zoom together (because we got rained out in Beijing) and talk about moving to China, life as an ESL teacher, movies and what makes them good or bad. It’s a comical conversation that I’m sure you’ll derive all sorts of pop culture factoids that...

Recorded Thursday, July 16, 2020. Journalist Chen Caiwei joins me today on the show to discuss everything from learning another language, dating and matching with people on Tinder (and how bad conversational techniques are used to learn a language), music and culture both in China and abroad, and life as a student overseas and a lot more! I’ll let you read through the show notes to see some of the topics we cover and the conversation does get intense at times. It’s not just debate, Caiwei...

This week’s guest (my second!) is a friend from my hometown, Winnipeg, Canada! Jake Sacher has over 20 years of experience in the music industry and now runs his own studio. In this episode we talk about the technology, working in the studio, the current music scene, how things have changed, how the internet changed things for everyone, and Jake’s advice for musicians who want to make a career in the music industry. Hope you enjoy! (We had some issues with Zoom before we going going but we...

Recorded on Tuesday, June 23, 2020 at Forbidden City Studios in Beijing, China. This week’s episode features my first guest! Former colleague and good friend Steve Blaque has been in China for nearly 20 years. A singer songwriter and recently and now retired, he agreed to sit down with me for a rather lengthy conversation about music and life in China. This conversation went on a lot longer than both of us expected but, instead of cutting it down, I’ve left just about all of it in and made...