The Friday Photo: Black Dragon Pool
This is Black Dragon Pool, one of the most tranquil places in beautiful Lijiang, China. It was built as a pleasure garden for the feudal...
Tagged: china
The Prettiest Town We’ve Ever Visited
Ever heard of Lijiang? It’s an old town in northern Yunnan, in what was once the Dali Kingdom, the fought-over hinterland between China and Tibet....
Learning Mandarin: Week 3
A week to go before we head out of Kunming into the great wide open, over 30 hours of language lessons in, and we are,...
The Friday Photo: Nine Dragon Pond
It’s been sunny lately. So t’other day we went to the park. And the park was a lake. With nine dragons. Now, the Chinese have...
Learning Mandarin: Week 2
So the boy and I have completed our second week learning Mandarin in China. We’ve only got a week’s more learning before we’re out on...
How to Ride a Bus in China
Even after boarding Indonesian ferries, riding rural Cambodian buses and squeezing onto the London Tube during the Christmas Eve shopping frenzy, taking the bus in...
Learning Mandarin: Week 1
Learning from our experiences in Indonesia, I figured it would be wise to start our sojourn in China by actually studying a bit of Mandarin...
The Friday Photo: Heavenly Palace
Yesterday we wandered through the skyscrapers of downtown Kunming to gawp at this ninth-century pagoda, set in a quiet garden where grandmothers take their grandchildren...
Anyone for Chicken Claw?
Wandering around Kunming, our “home” for the past week, I sometimes feel a little like those British journalists inspecting America during the Gilded Age, marvelling...
House-hunting in China — Easier than it Seems
This morning, I woke up on the 32nd floor, looked out of my bedroom window, across the smog that clouds the rising sun, across the...