A few weeks after I moved to Beijing, a family friend who studied in the city in the early 1980s came to stay.

She said there was an old saying about China the foreign students used to recite to each other. She couldn’t remember where the quote came from, but it went something like this:

“Stay in China two weeks you can write a book. Stay in China two months you can write a collection of essays. Stay two years, you can’t write a thing.”

The longer I live in China the more that quote makes sense. It’s so big, so baffling, so foreign that the more you learn the more you realise you don’t know.

This blog does not claim to provide any great insight into China – these are simply my personal observations and experiences of living in Beijing – and perhaps a few other topics if they take my fancy, (hey, it’s my blog).

I am an Australian journalist who moved to Beijing for work in mid-2012.

Thanks for visiting.