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 [...]

We don’t often devote an entire blog post to one attraction but The Great Wall of China probably deserves the honour, partly because it was one of the highlights of mum’s visit and partly because the photos are so good. For some reason I wasn’t expecting all that much of The Wall – how much [...]

Lucky, lucky you – I don’t post for weeks and now you’ve got two in five days! I’m celebrating the purchase of my beautiful new camera and I’ve got shutter fever. So here’s a bumper crop of photos from around Beijing.

Greetings readers, I’ve finally decided to emerge from my blog-shaped hermit home and say Nǐ Hǎo. I know, I know, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve channeled my diatribe onto the web but I’ve just had two glasses of imported chardonnay and I’m feeling insipid. Sorry I mean inspired.

Good morning class!
Whoops, sorry, I seem to be using this strange, chirpy teacher’s tone even outside the classroom; I think I might have lost my adult mind by December. I’m getting into the swing of things now though, and feeling far less worn out generally - I stayed up until 10.30 last night which is the early hours [...]

When I was a kid I used to whinge at my mother, who was a teacher in her former life, every time she came home from schoo tired: she’d stagger in, cook dinner, drink a glass of wine, collapse onto the sofa and nod off before the Simpsons had finished. Mum’s school was like a lunatic asaylum and consequently the nodding off routine [...]

I’ve been let off my leash. Or rather, I’ve been forced to untether my leash and pay a brief visit to Hong Kong for visa shenanigans - apparently, you used to be able to change a tourist visa to a business visa on the mainland but the Olympics gave the goverment an opportunity to throw a bureaucratic spanner in the works and it hasn’t [...]

Katie Melua doesn’t know what she’s talking about: there are nowhere near nine million bicycles in Beijing. I should think there probably were in the nineties, but over the past ten years they’ve been seriously upgraded and there are now nine million Mercedes…as well as fifteen million people, about three million building sites, half a [...]