Four weeks after arriving in Shenzhen, I just about got the hang my subway journey to work. Just as I had to leave. It wasn't so much that it was complicated - it wasn't; but it did involve a change of lines, and what made it seem tricky to me, was the counter-intuitive nature of the layout: each change involved going round and back on yourself, up or down escalators, sometimes even going to a different level for the same line. I found this particularly challenging when I wen

If you have been following these blogs so far, you could be forgiven for thinking that I'm spending my entire time in China eating, or riding up and down the thirty five floors of my hotel in the mirrored lift, asking hapless lift-mates 'does my bum look big in this?' This is the moment where you learn that life is pretty tough at the coal face of music assessment in China. I knew the week was going to be bad, when I woke abruptly early on Monday morning, straight from a drea

It's official: I'm huge in China. By this, I don't mean that the average Chinese person knows about me; I mean that I am quite literally enormous in size terms here. I remember this from my last trip here five years ago: the shops that seem so full of promise - wonderful clothes at reasonable prices; except you then discover that the only size that will go anywhere near you is Extra-Extra-Extra-Large. I discovered this the hard way, after purchasing a top in my normal 'go-to'

I've been in China for a week; and in that time, the thing I am most struck by, is the vastness of the place. I look out of my window on the thirty fifth floor of the Shenzhen Wyndham Grand Hotel, at skyscraper-scape as far as the eye can see. Or as far as the smog will let my eye see, to be exact: for the air here is thick with viscous, claggy matter, not so much pea soup as tiny iridescent particles that clog your airwaves and make you feel as though your head is wrapped in