China

So, if you're visiting this blog, you'll notice that we really slacked off the last few months in Australia. Work, fun and the ease of facebook.com got to us.

No more...because we're in Beijing China!

Again we visited the question, "why?" The simple answer is, China is next big thing and before it completely changes, we want to know it as a growing, changing nation. Our time here is limited - the commitment is only six months - but we hope in that time, we'll learn something about the way PRC works and plays. We picked Beijing because it's managed to retain much of the Chinese tradition, while also providing us enough work opportunity to make ourselves useful.

We arrived on September 24 and began work the following day. The first few days were full-on with establishing our residence and obtaining forwarded luggage. Fortunately, (and quite unexpectedly) we arrived just before the big national holiday and what's known as 'Golden Week'. Basically, we worked the weekend and got an entire week off in return. National day and Golden Week is akin to the US 4th of July and people from all the remote provinces make there way to the capital city, Beijing. To put things into perspective, some 380,000 foreigners came to Beijing to see the Olympics in August. During national week, an estimated 7 million came to Beijing.

Our first thoughts is that this place is huge and busy. Beijing is home to an estimated 20 million people (officially only 15 million reside) and it's by far the largest city I have ever lived in. People are out all day and night, traffic never really stops and most businesses are open late (10pm or midnight) while some never close. English is much more prevalent than I expected but that may be a result of the recent Olympics.

Check back soon for more updates.