Hot Dry Noodles 热干面的碎碎念

Happy Chinese New Year 2023 everyone! :) New year and new style of this podcast! Some of you might have noticed that there's now even a new intro in the beginning. I recorded 13 different versions and finally decided on this one. I think it sounds kinda cool. :D

It's crazy how fast time always goes by. Due to the pandemic and everything else going on in the world, I haven't been able to celebrate the CNY with my parents and the rest of the family for over 3 years. This year, though I'm still not physically yet, my spirits are with them. Hence this episode together with Vivienne and Paul, celebrating this biggest tradition for all Chinese in our own way.

Vivienne went to Portugal with her boyfriend to brace the advent of 2023 not long ago, during which they had a serious car accident. Fortunately, they both were safe and sound and returned to Germany without a glitch. This experience of hers basically kicked off our episode today, and then it also "resonated" with me and I shared an incident I had when I was much younger. It's so sad but at the same time also funny, because we're talking about such horrible experiences on such a festive day. But why not? Who said one cannot talk about unfortunate encounters on a festive day? :D

Quoting Vivienne, "It doesn't matter whether your memories of the past are good or bad, you're now writing your new memories for tomorrow."

Wishing you all a happy, prosperous and healthy year in the year of the rabbit! Cheers!

Music source: https://pixabay.com/

• At the side of an RPG village - Katzen Tupas
• LoFi Acoustic Guitar with HipHop Beat 0133 - TuesdayNight
• Little Break / LoFi Beat - SoulProdMusic
• Chinese Music - Traditional, New Year Celebration - SoundGalleryByDmitryTaras

Today is December 31st, 2022. It's the last day of the year.

I always believe that, to be able to brace the future, one has to bid farewell properly to the past first. It also applies to the soon-to-end 2022 and the upcoming 2023. Hence this episode to wrap up 2022 just for the sake of having to wrap it up. :)

This past year, the launch of this podcast brought me a great deal of joy and satisfaction, even though there is just a very small audience. Monetizing this channel was never my intention anyway.

Lots of crazy things have happened in the past 3 years. Physically, we've never been so far away from each other. However, we've also never been so close to each other at heart.

Right now, wherever you might be, whatever you might be doing, or however your 2022 might have been, I'd like to wish you a happy new year 2023.

Surprise surprise! This weekend is a double-episode feast, simply because we want to spoil our amazing audience! (What audience...? :D)

My podcast-launch guest Nelli and I are trying something new with this episode by recording today's session remotely, because it is just not always practical for my friends to come over to my place to do the recording face-to-face. Not to mention that even when we record on site, still, the audio quality can be very poor, see the S01E06 with Fei, though we enjoyed the content greatly. And to our surprise, the audio from this remote recording is incredibly good! That means in the future, I can do remote sessions with my guests more often regardless of the physical distance.

In terms of the content for this episode, Nelli goes down a "dark" path (that's what she called it) to share her personal experience of being a German but at the same time not feeling like a German at all. She says she needs to get it off her chest. So, if a German finds it already difficult when it comes to self-identity and integration in Germany, what are we complete foreigners supposed to do? I assume everyone might have their own answers to this question.

In any case, this remote recording experiment has opened new doors for my podcast, where I am more than happy to provide a platform for my guests and friends to express themselves and share our memories, personal stories as well as their ups and downs in Germany. With that being said, that's what makes this podcast meaningful, extremely so.

Fei was probably the first person I had discussed the idea of launching my podcast with earlier this year. I believe I sent her a voice message about this, but she never responded to that one...awkward...

We started our friendship as classmates in our master program back in 2013, and my first impression of her was horrible. However, over the past years, our friendship evolved to what it is today, somehow. She has been one of those who have witnessed my ups and downs as well as my growth along the entire journey in Germany since the very beginning. It was great to travel back to the past with her in this episode, while she came with her husband to visit us (and eat with us).

Last but not least, I am, again, disappointed in the audio quality of this episode. Having two mics is not working so well as expected. The voice is not clear at all compared to the past episodes where I only used one mic and recorded directly on my phone. In addition to that, there's a whole lot more echo. Maybe from the next episode on, I will simply go back to the way I started for a better audio experience. In any case, I wouldn't want to toss this 2-hour episode away, because we really enjoyed the content.

In the end, I don't want to jinx it, but I do want to say that December 2022 in Germany does not seem as difficult for me as it was in the past. I hope this positivity will stick around as long as it can. Peace.

By popular demand, my friend Vivienne came back to join me in this episode (she was eager to anyway lol). She has been in Germany for almost 20 years, and in my case, soon it will be 10 years. Therefore, we figured it would be a good cause for us to both take a look back at how and why we came to Germany. If only we could tell time to go slower.

This episode is in Chinese, in case you didn't notice ;)

We enjoyed the process of revisiting our journey to Germany in this episode, and there's simply so much to talk about that we cannot go through everything in a couple of hours, hence we covered as much as we could today. After all, it's an episode for ourselves, and we hope it could resonate with some of you in the audience.

This episode is together with my life partner Paul. As always, we just took it as we went, with no preparation in advance. The title of this episode was inspired by our walk-in closet at home, which was kinda funny, because there is no way we will ever go back into the figurative closet. ;)

This episode is in Chinese, and I have my close friend Vivienne to join me :) We talked about random topics without any planning in advance and wanted to see how it would go. In the end, it was kind of weird to hear ourselves speaking Chinese in the playback, but it was a great experience with my friend. Enjoyed it.

The launch of my podcast was a result of mixed reasons. In this episode, I try to elaborate on some of the most important ones. I even purchased a professional microphone for my podcast today!

Just a pilot