KTV, or Karaoke to you and me, is massive here. I know the stereotype is of drunk Japanese businessmen singing along with Shakira songs until the early hours but that image applies just as accurately to China as it does to Japan or anywhere else. The KTV bars themselves are quite literally on every street, in this city at least. There aren't a huge amount of normal bars or clubs here and so often on work nights out, birthdays, or other general celebrations, KTV seems to be the go-to-place. The ones I have seen have entrances and reception desks that have a very real feel of a fancy hotel about them. Once you have booked your room, you go to the shop and buy whatever you think you will need to help you sing infront of ... read more

Haggling, much like card tricks, making cakes and tying knots in balloons, has always been one of those arts - for arts they are - that I have never been able to master. I have tried and tried in various markets at home and abroad but I could never do it, and I was always incredibly jealous of anyone I saw doing it well. I always consoled myself with the fact that my shortcomings in this field are because I'm not just not a business person and that my lack of willingness to be a hard bargainer about money issues was good in other ways. Of course, this is rubbish, and the reality of it was that anytime I went near a market in Costa Rica, or anywhere else for that matter, there was always a ... read more

I think it's fair to say that the most famous thing about Xi'an is the Terracotta Army, certainly, it seemed to be the attraction that most people we met there were interested in seeing. In case you can't be bothered to google it and you want the most basic of facts given to you by a cretin like me, they were discovered by accident by a farmer in 1974. They were made during the Qin Dynasty during the reign of Emperor ShiHuangDi apparently because for the afterlife he wanted an army to fight with him and to protect him, his possessions and the three thousand concubines (women, not hedgehogs) that he had buried with him in a Mercury filled, man-made mountain about one mile from the site of the warriors. The guide we had described them ... read more

As I write this, I'm in a cafe listening to a Pan-Pipe cover of 'I wanna know what love is' by Foreigner. I wasn't sure what to expect with the music here, but it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, largely pop or dance stuff. Most of it is Chinese, obviously, but if you are only half paying attention or you don't listen to the words, musically it could pass for generic Western pop music. That's not to say American and European music hasn't infiltrated these shores to some extent. On occasion I will be walking down the street and hear something familiar being played in a shop or on the radio of a passing car. Shakira, Coldplay and Lady Gaga all seem to be fairly popular - and last week I heard Chelsea Dagger by The Fratellis in ... read more

Two months ago, when I was in Jinan, it was snowing, one month ago here it was so cold that my hands swelled up and I could see my breath when I was lying in bed. Now, I write this having been sitting outside for the last two hours in 30 degree heat eating ice-cream in the square. Strangely, despite me having spent most of my time since last September in either Costa Rica or China I am not someone who deals with the heat very well, and worryingly I cant imagine that this is going to be like it is at home where the worst of the sun is over by the end of June, and I can look forward to overcast rainy days until a brief Indian Summer in the early autumn gets everyone ... read more

Last Tuesday was Tomb-Sweeping day here in China. This is a festival where the graves of relatives are tended and visited in much the same way as we might do on the anniversary of a death. As well as being a day for this, it is also, in this part of the country at least, a day when people who have moved away from their home towns or their families, return to see them. Despite all of this, for me it just meant I had a few days off work. This all fitted in quite nicely as it came just as I was getting over my dependence on the toilet, as delicately described and documented last time, and it meant there was a chance to have a day or two exploring the city. So, day one ... read more

Before I came to China I bought a book which promised I could learn Mandarin in fifteen minutes a day if I studied from it for twenty weeks or so. This, unsurprisingly, is bollocks. The problem with the book, and I would venture, the problem that anybody starting to learn this language will have is that there are four different tones for each word. Essentially, this means that every syllable has four different meanings and if you say a sentence and you don't get at least a few of these tones right, you are risking being, at best, borderline incomprehensible and at worst, massively offensive. This is almost impossible, to my mind, to get the hang of without hearing it, and in any event it was barely mentioned in all of the one hundred and thirty ... read more