Don’t know what to say really except that it’s damned hard to photograph. Neither words nor images (sorry) convey the grandeur, the mystery or the importance of this structure (or, more correctly, series of structures) and its setting. It was a beautiful day and the crowds were manageable. We went to the Mutianyu access which [...]

Thinking about going to Beijing on National Day was the first mistake. The second was actually doing it. China holds about a third of the world’s population and most of them travel somewhere during the ‘National Day’ week (the anniversary of the founding of the ‘new China” in 1949). I think most of them went [...]

In a week I will have been in China for two months. In some ways it feels like the time has flown by, in other ways it’s like I’ve been here for a lot longer. And as I’ve settled in and (almost) got used to people spitting on restaurant floors, eating boiled eggs with 15-day-old [...]

Tired and worn out. Back any day – meantime, here’s me at The Wall.

Went for a ride around the immediate neighbourhood the other day. Every building you see in these photos (except the school and the stadium) is empty. It’s going on on a massive scale all over China, just unbelievable development – impossible to illustrate, let alone explain. I have read that there are about 64.5 million [...]

Every now and again a class or two – or, like this morning, the entire grade – is summoned to the courtyard in front of the classroom block, lined up, and taken for a military-style jog around the school. The teachers blow whistles and bark instructions and there’s call-and-answer but I don’t know what they’re [...]

Had a long weekend so did the tourist thing in Nanjing for 24 hours. It’s a bit different from the old backstreets. First stop, the Massacre Museum – a memorial to the 300,000 folk wiped out by Japanese invaders in 1937. This is the reason you don’t see many Toyotas or Mazdas on the streets [...]

Now that I’m mobile again I jumped on my bike yesterday and spent about five hours riding around town getting a whole bunch of stuff done. I got 100 colour business cards printed for $3, had my favourite shoes re-soled and heeled for $6, ate a huge bowl of pork wonton soup for $1, bought [...]

The foreign teachers were asked to attend the school assembly on Friday morning. So 5,000 students, 400 teachers and a handful of dignataries piled in to the neighbouring basketball stadium, used because there’s nowhere to accommodate that number here at Xin Ma. Of course it was all in the local lingo so it didn’t mean [...]

Decided to test my foot today and take one out of the four classes I have scheduled. Apart from fumbling with the data projector for several minutes without success it went pretty well. This was a class that was inexplicably cancelled last week so it was ‘intro and names’ for them. That is, introduce myself [...]