Where am I?

Funny, you travel five and half thousand miles and you still have catching up to do. The idea was to write a blog every night with my witty and insightful, er, insights into life in China but now it's way too late for that. Hopefully if I plough on like nothing had gone wrong in the first place, I'll be able to drop in stuff about the last three weeks as we go along.

But then again, I am a bit drunk at the moment so who knows?

But then again, again, beer is only 20p a bottle. And it's really good stuff. We've tried Snow Beer, Qing Dao Beer and "If only I had a Chinese characters set on my keyboard I'd tell you" beer which is actually pretty good too.

Our 'local' is called Cheers. Well, it is now - if only in our tiny expatriate minds. For the first couple of nights they brought us a menu when we sat down but now they know better: a round of beers first and then the Chinese roulette (a much happier version that the Russian one) of ordering food.

"We" and "us" (before you think I've gone all Margaret Thatcher on you) are: Rachel from the UK, Hero from Japan and Bick & Nadia from the USA. And guess what, I couldn't have asked for a nicer bunch of classmates. Bick and Rachel kindly posed for me outside the school; the other chap in the other photo is Oliver, a Chinese English teacher (you know what I mean) who is looking after us. More of him later, no doubt.

It's taken a while, but the chopsticks are working now. For my first few meals in China I always felt like the runt of the litter: everyone else was digging in furiously and all I was managing was a single grain of rice rested precariously on two wobbly chopsticks. And all of a sudden all the food had gone and I'd have to look wistfully forward to the next mealtime.

Ah, there's so much to chew over now: how terrorists just had to threaten the weekend I was travelling, the deprivation of flying without hand luggage (apart from anything and everything you could grab in duty free), the two weeks in Shanghai where I truly became a teacher (ha, ha) and the arrival in Chengdu - my home for a year and, who knows, maybe more?

But, hey, I've made a start. Your guess is as good as mine as to where it'll end up.