Yangzhou Half Marathon, China, April 26th 2009 This was to be my first road race for about 20 years so I was looking forward to it with some trepidation. Would my knees, hips and other geriatric bits hold out? In addition to this there were the 'Oh my god it's a foreign race' problems. Would there be water stations at regular intervals as in UK races. Would there be kilometre markers so I'd know how much agony there was yet to endure? Would I be able to find a...

I took advantage of my students' mid-term exams to take a long-awaited trip to Sichuan province. Time was limited so I decided to cut the 30 plus hour train journey and splash out on a 3 hour flight to Chengdu and back. The flight, the shuttle bus and the free map they gave us made getting to my hostel a dream. I'd somehow managed to get a dorm bed for 10 kuai a night which was even better. What didn't sound good though was that they told me that, as a foreigner...

It's about time I wrote something in this blog so here are another few random musings about life here. To work backwards, I've just come back from a few days in Beijing and it was so easy. The city's been transformed since I was last there in 2006 due to all the Olympic preparations but spitting is still alive and well in the streets, if not in the subway, and Chinglish is still around to gladden the heart, so all is not lost. It was just an overnight direct tra...

I've just come back from spending the national holiday week in Xi'an. After busting a gut earning 300 kuai for two hours work in a new language school here in Suzhou to help finance the trip I promptly had it all stolen. Things could have been a lot worse! To back-track, I reached Xi'an on the slowest train in the world, 20 hours in all, but I'd got a sleeper so it was fine. On arrival the station was packed, with not a taxi to be had, so I caught the number 603 ...

It's now late September already and I'm writing this in Word after my latest two hour long epic got blown away. Suzhou is 21st century China, a million miles away from the rural poverty ofthe remoter areas of Yunnan. We have everything here, from the Irish bar next door, Jane's pub up the road and Aussie Pulp Fiction bar a couple of blocks away, plus KFC on virtually every corner. In Shiquan Jie where I live I never hear people shouting 'lao wai' and staring ...