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 you read what I've been up to for the past while, because fundamentally this blog is exactly nothing more than a vanity project.

The title of this post's faintly misleading - most of the days have been pretty clear, although when the photo above was taken, the PM2.5 count was well over 200μg/m³, and by contrast, every EU state is signed up to try and ensure each city has a yearly average no higher than 25μg/m³. So yes, it's a bit smoggy at times. I've bought a mask; whether or not the filter's any good is utterly debatable, but at least it feels like I'm doing something. Meanwhile, most of China seems not to care - come smog or shine, there's invariably a group of old Chinese men sat outside the door to my building, playing Chinese chess, smoking like chimneys and (from what I can make out) using quite a few swear words to illustrate whatever points they're trying to make. On smoggy days you can normally see a few others wearing masks, but the most common thing done by people trying to resist the effects of their environment is women with either parasols, or the sort of sunvisors that Cobra Commander would have rejected for his evil soldiers' uniforms on the grounds that they look too menacingly camp. Apparently, while Western women are constantly told that men will vomit on seeing them in the street if they don't have goddess-bronze tans, Chinese women get told the exact opposite, and pale skin is considered the ideal because a tan means you look like some sort of poor person who works outdoors (eurgh). I suppose it's the same thought process at work - tanning only became sexy in the West once it implied the ability to go on holiday and lounge around on beaches rather than having to support oneself through manual labour - but it's quite funny nonetheless on gorgeous sunny days to see bevisored Chinese women looking like low-budget Darth Vaders.

Cheap though life undoubtedly is out here, I've decided to try and find myself some work teaching English to Chinese students for insanely high amounts of money, which in Beijing, given the priority parents give to their child's education, the importance of English for getting into university either in China or abroad, not to mention the reflected prestige I have in coming from Cambridge, is rather like taking candy from a candy-hating baby. The only issue so far is that all the companies I've spoken to so far seem rather keen to offer me the lowest price they think they can get away with, assuming that because I'm fresh off the boat I'm not aware that £20/hr is entirely reasonable for a tutor to expect, rising to £30+ if it's arranged privately, without a company creaming a middleman fee off the top. One woman in particular offered me 120RMB per hour, then went up to 150 in a heartbeat a few days later to beat another (low) offer. Then, once I told her I wasn't interested, she offered 200 without blinking. Needless to say, by that point I wasn't willing to trust her business practices.

It does look like my patience might pay off though; one of my teachers is trying to find tutors for her and her friends' children, and it looks like I'll get 200 an hour for reading and discussing English novels with a 9-year old Chinese girl. Not the most difficult job in the world. Also, there's an 'educational consultancy' firm based in London which coaches the children of the rich into British private schools, and they've expressed an interest too. They pay their tutors pretty well, and if I get it it'll put me into contact with some rather well-off, well-connected families and give me a springboard into arranging some private tuition gigs for even more money. All in all, I'm glad I'm holding out, rather than ending up like a classmate of mine who signed the first contract she saw, who now gets 130RMB/hour teaching the kids that none of the other tutors at that company will accept.

As far as classes are concerned, week 1's over, and with it has come a relatively high amount of work. I'm probably not working harder than I was at Cambridge, but there's definitely more work being explicitly set by teachers here. On the other hand, we don't have classes on Friday, giving me a nice big 3-day weekend every week to make up for the much shorter holidays (which don't even cover Christmas, but I doubt anyone'll be going in for that). Supposedly, by the end of this year we'll have read at least a decent chuck of each of the 4 great novels in Chinese literature, which is more than most Chinese people manage (think Shakespeare in the UK).

There's not much effort made by the university to integrate us into 'regular' student life as experienced by the Chinese students - if there was a societies fair, for example, we most definitely weren't told anything about it. So I have yet to find out what the deal is with the rowing squad, which is a massive shame. In place of rowing, however, I've taken up kung fu with an instructor who apparently spent over a decade living at Shaolin temple. 7 hours a week, and I pay monthly so pretty much have to attend each class regardless of how much my muscles protest. It occurs to me that back when I got my karate blackbelt, at 17, I was probably the fittest I've ever been, and I was only doing 4 hours a week for most of that time. So, if I can force my knackered frame to attend as many of these classes as possible, I should be in rather good shape indeed within a few months, however much gorgeously oily Chinese food I shovel down my throat.

Right, so, the story, which just so happens to segue nicely from the fact that I'm doing kung fu (almost as if I planned it that way...). First, some context: In one of the many token gestures by which Communism is officially preserved in China, all Chinese university students have to do a few weeks of 'military service' in their first year, which essentially consists of marching around a few times, being shouted at by drill instructors who seem to be far too aware of how pointless the exercise is to actually give a s***, and probably being lectured about how Communism's great and how all Japanese are evil b******s (google 'Rape of Nanking', 'Unit 731' and 'Yasukuni shrine'. Then watch https://www.youtu.be/G7xP5EFThh0, because all that stuff's kinda depressing and the video's reasonably on the money) It's understandably unpopular amongst most students, although I'm personally not opposed to the idea of national service (because in a former life I was a retired army officer who wrote letters to the editor of the Telegraph) but it's unlikely to change any time soon. So, on with the story.

The kung fu classes take place outdoors at Tsinghua university, on a balcony overlooking their athletics field, and more than once we've been joined by a small battalion of bored 18-year-olds who look like they'd rather be literally anywhere else, marching up and down the running track to jaunty march music. But then, on Tuesday, I noticed something unusual. The students were doing some kind of drill that involved crawling across the field (pretending it was the Japanese homeland, no doubt) and I noticed that the music that was being played was from Skyrim, a video game I'm an absurdly huge fan of (listen here https://www.youtu.be/u1jBjlXxuno - it's incredible). Now, games consoles are banned in China and I imagine the PC version of this game didn't make it past the censors for a variety of reasons, so at first I just thought it was another funny steal of Western media by Communists whose population won't know the difference, like when North Korea used footage from Call of Duty in its propaganda showing New York under attack, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it's not exactly hard to see how the Skyrim storyline could be an analogy for Tibetan independence. Let's look at why this game won't have made it past the censors:

• Skyrim, the area in which the game is set, is a remote, mountainous province at the extremity of an empire.
• The race who make up most of that province's population have a long, proud history independent from that of the rest of the empire, and are culturally distinct.
• The province is in the middle of a rebellion against the empire, made possible by a weakened central government and sparked by a decree restricting the traditional religion (the game begins with the player captive on a cart with the leader of the rebellion, both of you being taken for execution but you both make a daring escape)
• Meanwhile, the province, indeed the whole world, is under attack from real dragons.
• You, the player, are the latest in a line of mortals to be blessed with the soul of an immortal being. This allows you, after killing a dragon, to absorb its soul and increase your own power (OK, I'm pretty sure the Dalai Lama can't do that last bit, but there's definitely some parallels with the idea of reincarnation there)
• Whether you play any part in the rebellion or not (to be fair, you can also fight for the empire and put the rebellion down), the climax of the main storyline comes with you, the player, ascending to the traditional culture's heaven to kill the main dragon who's trying to destroy it.

So, there you have it. Either someone in the PLA has an incredible sense of irony in training new conscripts to this music, or they're all completely clueless. I'm inclined to favour the first possibility, since once Skyrim finished, they played the Pirates of the Carribean theme. I'm not sure if that's banned in China or not, but there's probably some irony in that as well; a hero who lives by his wits, searching for a way to get rich quick whilst keeping one step ahead of the government (and who, y'know, is literally a pirate) would probably resonate quite well with a Chinese audience, but that's enough musing from me. Go and read about Syria or something.