I now know a little of what it feels like to be Stephen Hawking. No, not in that way (I can feel the scoffing already); I mean by having to distill an immense amount of information into something digestible by the general public (or in my case by a handful of friends and family and those arseholes that spam the trackbacks). Hawking undertook this onerous task when writing his masterpiece, “A Brief History of Time”. This was a seminal piece of work that furthered his genius (to even more seemingly improbable heights) simply because he was able to take the most complex human imaginings and theories (a lot of which were his own) and make them understandable to the layperson. Make no mistake, this was a hugely important piece of work, and he understandably received plaudits from every quarter of the universe for it. The work I present here is far more important than that, and it’ll only be read by a tiny fraction of the people that read Hawking’s gem and receive no acclaim whatsoever. I suppose my genius will always be underappreciated ...   more »

Back in London, Hannah and I were regular attendees of the live music circuit, surely one of the best music scenes in the world (if not the best). One of the things we’ve missed the most since we’ve been living in Beijing (it’s been officially over a year now!) is the ability to go and watch some excellent live music at a moment’s notice, or buy tickets to see a live music juggernaut play to a stadium sized crowd (Muse at Wembley in 2007 springs to mind). This has been made so much more unbearable when you hear the kind of music that Beijingers seem to like. If you watched the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony you will have seen and heard the dreadful pap that they love here; boy and girl bands singing the type of fearsome rubbish spouted out by reality TV shows like X Factor and Pop Idol. Now, I think that my views are generally quite liberal, but for people and “bands” like these, and the boil on the anus of music that is their sound, I make a strong exception (and even more so for the, frankly, waste of sperm that are people like Pete Waterman and Simon Cowell). Drab music and meaningless lyrics sung by plastic shells of human beings with homogenised singing voices. There is no punishment in my eyes too harsh for the abysmal horse manure that is produced by these festering piles of sloppy excrement. People may say that they are clean cut, don’t do drugs and are a good image for our children to follow. Well allow me to quote the late, and very great, Bill Hicks in response; “when did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children?!” Anyway…   more »

On the day before the race, David and Becky (in China on the last leg of their year long world tour and our guests for their stay) and Hannah and I decided that we would get up early and make our way to a section of the marathon in order to cheer on the athletes as they tried to write themselves into the history books. We had done our research the night before and found several sources depicting the route the runners would be taking on the Chinese version of that taken by Pheidippides running from the Battle of Marathon to Athens. This proved far trickier than we thought it would; a quick search turned up several different Beijing marathon routes, each of which claimed to be the “Official Route of the Marathon of the Beijing Olympic Games”. Deciding that the safest bet would be the route published most recently, we set our alarms for what can only be described as offensively early and retired to bed for what felt like about two minutes ...    more »

About a two hour drive to the north of Beijing lies a resort called Nanshan where, for very reasonable rates, it's possible to ski or snowboard. Rising early on Saturday morning, a group of us travelled to Nanshan in a tour minibus to see if we could get through the day without serious injury and possibly come away with a new skill to boast about to friends ...   more »

Hutongs (a Mongolian word meaning "water well" - many homes like this were built around wells thus providing a constant source of water) are the traditional living arrangement in Beijing. They are courtyard style houses clumped together that make a maze of alleyways leading from one Hutong to another. To the untrained (i.e. western) eye it does look like a mess of houses surrounded by walls, with access to a particular courtyard only possible by first having to negotiate the labyrinth successfully ...   more »

Beijing (literally meaning "North Capital") is a bizarre location for a city, let alone the capital of the biggest emerging economy and future superpower. It was not built on a river or by the sea (like a lot of towns and cities) and receives an incredibly small amount of rainfall in the winter and autumn, suffers from severe dust storms in the spring and is extremely hot in the summer. How is it that this place has risen to greatness, given that everything points towards it being not altogether ideal? The answer lies in Feng Shui, something that the Chinese take incredibly seriously ...   more »

People do recognise and celebrate this end of year festival in China, but not quite in the same way or with the same amount of marketing fervour. Christmas lights get put up everywhere; shop windows, big malls, across high streets and in the windows of apartments and houses. However, there are no adverts informing us where to buy our presents from or shops trying to ram their products down our throats by suddenly devoting half the store solely to festive goods. There are Christmas trees put up outside malls and people queue up (young and old) to have their photos taken with ... a penguin (well, not a real one, but a grown man stuffed into a big fluffy costume). There is no sign of a jolly, white bearded fat man clad in red anywhere. In his absence, people jostle and push (the Chinese do not queue) to buy tickets so that they can stand by a huge and lavishly decorated tree and be photographed with the flightless bird. Well, at least penguins exist ...   more »

Recently, Hannah and I were eating at our favourite restaurant (well, favourite until we eat at any of the other many and varied restaurants near where we live and discover an alternative) when a spot of trouble broke out. We were enjoying stuffing our greedy little western faces when we heard the unmistakable sound of something smashing in the near vicinity. Looking round we saw a local sending a volley of harsh words into the corner of the establishment (well, I assumed they were harsh, especially given the response he received). Some screaming followed his words, as did some more crockery, shattering just over his head. Foolishly he decided that the best course of action was to make immediately for the trouble spot and see if he could sort things out ...   more »

Unlike London, the underground trains in Beijing are very cheap; 2 RMB per trip (that equates to approximately 13p) and by trip I mean you can travel from anywhere on the underground to anywhere else on the underground, no matter how many different lines you need to use and how long your journey is. At present there are only 4 lines operating; Line 1, Line 2, Line 5 and Line 13. These serve Beijing pretty well but, again unlike London, they don't cover the entirety of the city. If you live in the east or west, you'll have to get a taxi everywhere (or at least to the closest station), since the subway only really covers central Beijing, the north and the south (and even then it doesn't stretch all the way north or south). What there is, though, is pretty good ...   more »

Being that China is such a big country, the roads there can be built to a larger scale much more American in feel than European (which have tiny roads). The main roads charging through Beijing, for example, are anything up to six carriages wide and the volume of vehicles on these roads is astounding. Cars routinely change from lane to lane - you don't have to be in any lane to overtake, nor have to indicate to let anyone know that you are going to do so. Simply swerve out into any unoccupied road space, no matter how small, and hope that the cars in the lane you're moving into somehow know what you are going to do. Crossroads are frankly insane, with 894 lanes of traffic all converging at the same time in the same place and the drivers don't seem to pay all that much attention to anything that is not vehicular and on the roads ...   more »

So what's it been like living in Beijing, even if it has only been for a few days? Weird and wonderful. It surprised us both just how modern a lot of Beijing actually is and how much of a western feel it has as well. There are brand new shopping malls all over the place (and lots more being built - a feature of Beijing is just how many new buildings are going up in preparation for the Olympics with construction workers going at it night and day), containing all the sort of stores you'd find in most malls and arcades in the UK; French Connection, Morgan, Sony, Lacoste, Mango, Nike, Levi's and if you want refreshment and fast food, there are Starbucks and KFC's everywhere ...   more »