I’ve just downloaded a load of snaps from my iPhone, enjoy!

Hello readers
Apologies for the lapse in blogging – our lives seems to have finally settled into a routine over the last few months.  We’re still enjoying our adventures, although they’re not as geographically diverse as last year!  Here’s a few highlights from the last few weeks:

Laura has come over from the UK and spent four [...]

Leigh (my sis) and Pan have been visiting us here in Beijing for the last week, and we’ve been rather busy. We’ve hit all the usual Beijing tourist hotspots plus we even managed to squeeze in a trip to Xi’an to see the teracotta army and visit the panda sanctuary. I’ve been busy [...]

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 [...]