It's been a bit longer than I hoped since my last post, but nowhere near as long as the last gap so at least I'm getting better as I come into the final stretch. It feels strange to still be writing at this stage - my ticket back to the UK is booked and I'm making more plans for when I return than for the month or so I've got left out here. On the other hand, that means I've (semi-successfully) kept a blog going for the whole of my year abroad! That has to count ...

The moment you've all been waiting for is finally here. I am blogging again! After, oh God it's been three months (and then some), I'm finally far enough down my to-do list that I can once more sit down and distill my experiences and musings so that my blog might re-emerge, Lazarene, for the delectation of my legion of admirers (although I did quit Facebook back in January so I'm not expecting circulation to reach the giddying heights of previous posts without he...

I'm surpassing my own expectations here, writing a new post a mere 2 weeks after my last one and in the run up to Christmas no less! Well, I hadn't been expecting to have had such a relatively eventful fortnight, with actual events I can write about instead of pseudo-highbrow waffling masquerading as commentary. So, without further ado, I'll get right into it. Last weekend was a bizarre concentration of new experiences in what has otherwise been a fairly uneve...

Well so much for posting regular, short updates! It's getting more and more difficult to find things to write about as I get more and more used to life in Beijing - the entry-level odd stuff that I kept noticing in the first few weeks now seems entirely normal, and like a junkie who needs to take more and more of his drug of choice to get a fix, there's not a huge amount (of what I see day-to-day) that causes me to even raise an eyebrow. That said, I did see so...

So, I turned 21 on Wednesday. The plan I mentioned in the last post to get everyone together and buy a bottle of Maotai fell through when I saw just how much even a small bottle costs. I could literally have bought enough of the cheap stuff to fill a hot tub. So instead I went onto Taobao (a Chinese site roughly similar to Amazon, which they also have out here, but cheaper) and had a look to see what drinks I could get from home. I wasn't disappointed - a bottl...