Lost in Translation
It’s gone on long enough: I’ve been in China for six months and existed on a vocabulary of roughly five hundred Chinese words plus a handful of characters to get by. Since many foreigners living full time in Beijing speak an impressive amount of Mandarin, my relative ineptitude is beginning to make me [...]

Look what I’ve got! Just bought this baby today, a top quality folding bike. Breaks are shonky but feeling more like a beijinger!

Welcome to the Year of the Tiger!
Although New Year’s eve waslast night, I got my first taste of New Year celebrations, Chinese style, on the way home from work last Monday: I was in the process of crossing the dual carriage way to get to my bus stop, and something rolled into the road and [...]

We’re back in the swing of things here in Beijing, and so far it’s been a surprisingly smooth ride.  We’ve moved into a fantastic apartment in a lively part of town, we’ve got great views over the city and best of all we no longer eat supper sitting on the end of the bed.
Not wanting [...]

Hello readers, it’s a rather festive, de-mob happy James here penning the final blog post of the year whilst humming along to “Do they know it’s Christmas?”.  If ‘they’ in question are the Chinese then the answer is oh yes, they know it’s Christmas.  Sure, in a straw poll you’d undoubtedly discover that not many [...]

Despite the lack of carols, trees and fairy light in Beijing, James and I have spent the last fortnight preparing for Christmas. Kind of. As you might be aware I’m not usually the most festive elf on the block, but this year I’m really looking forward to it, partly because we’re popping home to see everybody and [...]

Whilst Ebeneezer Ivanov has been bah-humbugging in Beijing, Matt and I have had a cracking time in Xi’an, home to China’s infamous army – the Terracotta Warriors. We shot down on Monday morning and spent three snowy nights in a cosy hostel in a traditional Chinese townhouse. Even though we are well and [...]

I’d like to add a bad tempered caveat to James’ previous post – snow is crap. Cold and crap. Unless you’re ski-ing, when it serves a purpose, but there are no hills in a fifty mile radius of here.
Sorry, but as the festive season approaches my mood generally plummets anyway (the plummeting is exponential to [...]

Ho ho ho, merry christmas!  Ok, it’s a little premature but I’m feeling rather festive here in ‘jingers thanks to the recent snowfall that’s coated the normally grey city with a couple of inches of white icing.  Our friend Matt (Skeath, from Vodafone) has come out to sample the wonders of China (he didn’t believe [...]

For the past month we’ve been enjoying the kind of weather that makes even a city as urbanised as Beijing look rather lovely. The days are getting shorter and cooler, but the weird summery pollution haze that hung over August and September has disappeared, the sky is a ridiculous shade of blue, the trees are [...]