At last I'm able to sit down and take a few hours to collect my thoughts about the things that have happened since my last post, in the hope that at least some of them will be interesting. Well, when I say 'able' I should say 'forced'; landing with all my weight on my ankle during kung fu has left me hobbling around the flat over the weekend, and it's amazing how much headway it's possible to make on work when you can't walk or cycle anywhere interesting. Annoy...

Having read through my last few posts, I've noticed two things: it looks like one post every two weeks is a fairly manageable rate, and I'm not all that great at coming up with opening lines. So I'm just going to hop right into something that literally just happened as I opened up my laptop, and hopefully post this before the weekend's over. [Note: this was written last weekend. Whoops]. Amongst the many fine channels that make up the televisual landscape in...

First, an update related to my last post: Sinostand, a China blog with which I've been in love for about a year now, has also done a piece on military training in Chinese universities, with footage of the same stuff I've been watching during my kung fu classes: http://sinostand.com/2013/09/22/video-behind-chinas-college-military-training/ Naturally, it's far better written and more interesting than I could manage, so everyone should go and read that. I'll wait. ...

Wow, hadn't realised it had taken me so long to put up another post until I saw that it's been very nearly two weeks. Apologies to the hordes of readers I'm sure I have, who must have been utterly bereft waiting for news, photos and stories from this crazy country. Well, photos I have in abundance, as well as news, and at least one story good enough that I can claim with some justification that this blog is more than a vanity project. But first I'm going to make ...

Eurgh. Who'd have thought that moving to the country that invented bureaucracy, on the other side of the world, would involve so much hassle? Whether it was my cards not being accepted, a bank refusing to sort out a Western Union transfer because I hadn't brought utterly superfluous paperwork, filling a flat and paying rent while one of the tenants is away in Nepal, or what for the sake of magnanimity I'll call a miscalculation by Peking University as to what the...