Lao Wai (Old outsider); Wai Guo Ren (Outside Country Person) Recently, I realised with something of a shock that I had hit the four-month mark: if I do not renew my contract, this marks a third of my total time in China. Living here brings with it such a relentless plethora of new experiences that I've been at something of a loss as to how to articulate them here, but I fear if I don't give it a bash now then another four months will go by and I'll still be ree...

So yesterday an actually quite scary thing happened: cycling down Ren Min Nan Lu on my way to work, I was hit by a car. Ridiculously, given the fact that I was thrown straight out into two lanes of oncoming traffic, both I and the trusty steed (that's the BIKE, filth) have survived reasonably unscathed. In even luckier news, the driver took full responsibility, drove me to hospital and paid for my treatment. Two hours, four pints of iodine, and one complementa...

Oh my good lord, I've been here a month. Apologies for the long blog absence, everything has happened incredibly quickly and the job - whilst genuinely wonderful - is pretty gosh darn time- and labour-intensive! I should start by saying that I am very firmly in my 'honeymoon' period with Chengdu at the moment. Whilst a part of me does yearn for the architecture and idiosyncracies of home (hearing 'Hi_Tech Zone' and 'North Railway Station' announced on the Metr...

Three days in, and the reality of day-to-day life in a country where I am basically a toddler - three phrases (plus assorted, largely useless pronouns) of the language, illiterate save for a few arbitrary characters ('China'; the numbers one, two, three and ten), and lacking the social skills for smooth inter-personal relations - has started to hit home. Before this move, the most dramatic I had undertaken had been my university year abroad in France. At the ti...