Well here I am, back in my beloved flat in Budapest, with the morning light, grey though it is, barging through my front windows. For the sake of my fair and gentle readers I will cast my mind back across continents and timezones to recount my last adventures in and around Beijing. "Bu dao Chang Cheng fei hao han" says the scrawly handwriting of Mr Mao at the Great Wall of China - "No arrive Great Wall never good person", by which I suppose he means that one may never consider oneself truly worthy or fulfilled without having taken the 919 [View Full Entry]

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Hardly a minute to spare these days as we swing from major tourist attractions to haggly shopping to fine feasts to Beijing pubs, where, incidentally, there is a thriving live music scene, singer-songwriters to beat the band, long hair and patterned plectrums, and meaningful chords (especially ninths) emanating from every edifice and orifice. Missing a day of blogging means that I now have far too many great Chinese experiences to write about and my flight leaves tonight at 2.20 (about the price of a Chinese main course, incidentally). Aggh! I have to look at my photos to actually remember all [View Full Entry]

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Well I'm stumped and stifled and stilted: I cannot think of a single joke using the word Beijing...so I'm in mourning for the punnage potential of Shanghai and Xian. What a Shanghaily disappointing Xianticlimax to my literary tour of major Chinese cities. Oh oh oh! Wait! As I sipped my black tea in KFC yesterday (I'm a sucker for Chinese culture), there was nowt but Christmas music on the radio...Deck the Halls, I Saw Mommy Kissin' Santa Claus, I Wish it could be Christmas Every Daaay. Sure I was only waiting for Beijingle Bells. YES!!!! (Sorry Mam, I'm sure you saw [View Full Entry]

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Despite the reservations of my travel companion about the length of our stay in Xi'an, I am delighted that we had today to explore the many sights of this "north-western" city - as my Shanghai-calibre guide continuously refers to it, though it is clearly and firmly plonked in the eastern half of this ginor(year of the) mouse country, according to my map at least. Hello to my Xi'aunties! So, like, we headed off after the customary full Chinese breakfast, suitably clad in warmest woolies (us, not the breakfast), and hopped on the bus to the partly authentic and partly restored city [View Full Entry]

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Happy birthday to my coolest, most favouritest sister! Arrived in Xian yesterday after an easy trip from Pudong airport in Shanghai. On the way to the city centre I saw my favourite Chinese roadsign again- "Rear end collision: keep distance". A look at the main streets yesterday revealed an alarming number of designer shops in what is otherwise a much less affluent city than the Shanghaive of activity we left behind. Nevertheless Xian has some lovely features, such as a restored city wall with Chinese-style towers, a magnificent bell tower positioned arc-de-triomphe-like in the middle of a [View Full Entry]

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Time for Chinese New Year dinner...yippee! Incessant fireworks around the area all day. I've just zipped my new suitcase with a meagre 20kgs inside..I didn't think of the internal flights in China when I brought nearer 30 kgs from Hungary. Luckily Hailing can take some of it for me to Xi'an and Beijing. This afternoon we went to the supermarket, and I was kicking myself that I didn't bring my camera. The crowds are a bit hard to describe. Remember Tesco on Christmas Eve? Well multiply that by about 50 and imagine 53 checkouts going hell-for-leather. I saw one other foreigner, [View Full Entry]

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We went to Shanghai South Railway Station early on Sunday morning to try to get tickets to the picturesqueueue city of Hangzhou. You may have seen on the news that some Chinese stations are aflood with masses of anxious travellers these days, and that in some places the trains just cannot travel because of the snow. Happily for us tourists, and unhappily for the poor unfortunates elsewhere, there were no such problems in Shanghai. The army has been called in to all the major stations, and the masses are flooding through Shanghai station in the most orderly fashion imaginable. The place [View Full Entry]

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Well I can't believe I'm here at another Saturday, with its attendant soundtrack of scales and ditties live at the Pudong Czerny furnace, under the watchful ear of Professor Wang...ee orr san (1 - 2 - 3!). I see in the nooz that much of China is in crisis because of the snow. Shanghai has a few flakes all right but nothing to write home about. So I won't. Frightening stuff on the telly though from other provinces - no water, no electricity for more than a week. Shanghai is doing its bit by turning off the flashy lights of the [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday we went to the beautiful town/city of Suzhou (sue Joe) which, though it is only 75Km from Shanghai, was unfortunately separated from it by the mother of all traffic jams. Tranglam trachta sron le toin (no fadas out here) (That's Irish, by the way) doesn't even begin to describe it! I kid you not we were in the car for 10 hours yesterday...5 there and 5 back, for a journey that typically takes 1 and a half hours max each way. It seems that Shanghai exists in a cosy little microclimate where snow is kept to a minimum by the [View Full Entry]

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Today I went along with Herself to a conducting course given by a Swedish choral conductor. Hailing and her friend Jenny (a lovely girl who is for all the world the spitting image of Maria Doyle Kennedy...yer wan from the Commitments) were taking turns translating, rehearsing, directing and accompanying. Not your average translators, these lassies! And without wanting to sound too adoring, it fairly puts you in your musical place to hear them hopping around the choir parts and the intervals not a bother on them, the hoors. Why didn't I practise the piano more?!! It was good to be there [View Full Entry]

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