All apologies

We're back.
I hope our absence hasn't lost your interest.

We've been up to loads and I guess something approaching a normal work routine has started. Consequently we have been busy and a little knackered.
So consider this something of a super-update.
Here are five videos I have recently uploaded to Youtube:

This is taken in a Xinjiang Restaurant not far from our apartment.

This video is the skyline of Beijing taken from Beihai Park with an amateur choir singing in the background.

This is the flag lowering ceremony in Tian'anmen Square, short and uneventful, but still good to see.

This is a very short clip of a man writing the character for North on the floor in water at Beihai Park.

Finally this is a short clip of people piling onto a bus, outside of my work.
Which clip leads me nicely into the normal post I had intended to write.

The Best and Worst of Beijing.
Well, it’s neither the best nor the worst actually.
It’s more like a good thing and a bad thing in Beijing, but that just doesn’t make for a snappy title, does it?
I have discovered a new route to and from work, which saves me a bit of time.
I take the 628 bus from the South Gate of the University to Datun Dong Lu.
There I change and take a subway, line 5 south to Yonghegong Lama temple.
At the Lama Temple (no lamas as previously noted) I change onto Line 2, effectively the central Circle line. Then it’s one stop anti-clockwise to Dongzhimen, a 15 minute walk from our apartment. Were buying bikes this weekend, so that should be a 5 minute bike ride.

Anyway, this particular example comes from the 628 bus on Thursday night at about 18:00. The bus is a little full when it picks us up outside uni, no seats left obviously. After a few stops it’s filling up pretty well. Full, in fact by Newcastle standards. Then it stops at Baofang. And approximately 40 people rush the front and middle doors. Often people will be carrying huge unidentifiable packages too.
Each bus has a conductor/trice on too.
However, his/her job is not to regulate the number of people on the bus, merely to sell tickets to the few people that don’t have oyster cards, to duplicate the electronic announcer and shout out each stop before we get there and to stick his/her hand out of the window in a more threatening manner than the mere indicator light to warn errant cyclists and motorists that the bus intends to maneuver.
So the band point is that these buses have absolutely no maximum capacity, the number of people the bus takes is the number of people that want to get on.
I am bigger and sadly bulkier than many of the other passengers which means I suffer less from the crush than most. However it still makes getting off an interesting experience. And that brings me to the good point.

As I have already mentioned, public transport in Beijing is excellent. If you use one of the easily available Oyster-like cards, buses cost 0.04€ and subways cost 0.20€. Ridiculously cheap. Different buses work in different ways, but on the 628 you have to swipe your card on the way off as well as on. However, with so many people on the bus, just getting off is challenge enough without worrying about swiping your card. Anyway, on this particular day I had elbowed my way close to the door and a girl nearby could see I was getting off, but had no chance of swiping my card. As she was closer to the reader, she motioned to offer to do it for me.

Now, under normal circumstances I would never pass my wallet, full of cards, if not money, to an absolute stranger in a new and relatively unfamiliar city. After all, she would only need wait 'til the doors opened and nip off into the crowds leaving me wallet-less. However, this being Beijing I briefly considered it and passed her the wallet. She swiped the card and passed the wallet back to me.
So far my experiences of China in this regard have been great, no-one seems to be out to fleece you directly and certainly not to steal from you. All of the people you speak to on this topic are most worried that when they move back home or to another country they will be so naive from living in China that they will be victims of crime immediately.

So perhaps you think I'm a little bit foolish from this story, but you should also take away from it that Beijing is remarkably safe, especially for a capital city, especially with so many people.

I have also uploaded a load of new photographs to flickr, you can see them all here.
I've organised them all into sets, so check out the latest ones.