After Julianna headed back to Hong Kong, where she would go straight to work, I headed to Shenzhen North Station, in anticipation of what would be the second-worst journey of my holiday. Leaving one of China's most modern cities, I would have to experience 24 hours of hardseat strife, before arriving in one of its most historic. Making myself comfortable on the train, it occured to me that my only sources of entertainment were: a concise guide to Milton Friedman...

'Golden Week,' China's national holiday, meant that we had a week off to do whatever we wanted. I decided to go south to Shenzhen to meet Julianna, then back north to Hangzhou, where I would meet Freddie, Charly and Lucy. Getting tickets was a stressful affair. Tickets are only available a week before the journey, and since Golden Week is the busiest time of year, it became a race to get any ticket that wouldn't involve a hard seat or a standing journey. In the ...

Rather than go through all the mundane details of my life in Beijing, I will describe some of the vaguely interesting things that have happened so far this term: I bought a bike, like all students do here (except for Koreans - they all seem to prefer vespas). It doesn't have any gears and the shop assistants had to add in an extra bar to make the seat high enough for me. It seems to work well enough, apart from one occasion: one of the pedals fell off and I had ...

At about six in the morning, I was woken by the sound of people getting up to see the sunrise over the Steppe. When I felt the cold air come through the door, I decided firmly against doing anything that involved getting out from under my duvets. When we were all getting up, around two hours later, Freddie discovered a giant spider on his blanket, and calmly pointed it out to everyone. This caused a general state of panic in the room, and Freddie decided to deal ...

By nine o'clock in the morning, the seven of us were packed into a coach with a load of other tourists from all over the world, racing out of Hohhot deep into the Inner Mongolian Grasslands. I managed to sleep for the first few hours of the journey; when I woke up, we were already far outside the city, twisting and turning along empty hillsides, through poor villages where practically every wall seemed to be plastered in what looked like Cultural Revolution sloga...