My old enemy…..stairs.

I’m now 5 weeks and 80 additional working hours into the lesson planning project mentioned in my last post which has me effectively shackled to the desk and so I decided that for my next couple of days off I was in need of some serious leg-stretching exercise! Thankfully Ruian gladly provides in that respect […]

Wonderful West Lake

Having dealt with British Rail on a bank holiday weekend in the past I was expecting the worst. On the first day of ‘Golden week’, with almost half of China’s population on the move and an estimated 11 million people headed for the same city as us,  surely the train was going to be a […]

Madness, madness, they call it madness…..

So tomorrow is ‘national day’ in China, a universally celebrated public holiday commemorating the founding of the Communist party and marking the start of 4 days public vacation. In keeping with the way things are done in China, they go big. When the holiday comes around, the cities shut down & everyone heads out either […]

You can take the boy out of Dublin Gospel Choir but……

Singing in Chinese is hard. Especially when you don’t speak Chinese your singing to an all-Chinese audience of Rai’an’s movers, shaker’s & bigwigs And so as I was ‘encouraged’ out onto the stage hand-in-hand with Camille, a 50-something long-time Chinese student of King’s, in front of a few hundred potential new clients at the new […]

0-100 in 36 hours

The twisted metal and shrapnel surrounding the tunnel entrance didn’t do anything to allay my fears. I was already convinced the coach driver had decided to end it all and take us with him such was the nature of his ‘driving’ (think how you drive playing GTA after you’ve come home from the pub drunk) […]