China!

In less than twenty four hours I'll be on a plane heading towards China, where I'll be spending the next three weeks drinking tea and Tsing Tao beer, eating noodles and Peking Duck, catching high speed trains and tediously slow buses, walking down new hutongs and old expressways, listening to symphonies of traffic and melodious choruses of spitting, mis-reading Mandarin street signs and Dan Brown novels, visiting the Beijing Museum of Tap Water and the Great Wall, meeting kooky travellers and even kookier locals, dancing to David Bowie and Iggy Pop singing "China Girl" (okay, that's a joke), spending oodles of Yuan on Gucci face masks and Louis Vuitton bum bags, breathing in fragrant pollution and the blissful steam from lotus buns, touching the falling dust and the rising sky, dressing up as Mao and Deng Xiaoping at the same time, dodging taxi touts and suspect puddles, riding cranky bicycles and mud-brown waves, laughing at myself and others and generally doing all of the things I don't do in my normal life. I'm sure, however, that within days I'll be yearning for the intramanet, so this post is not so much a farewell as a temporary retreat from blogging, which I hope to take up again at some point in the future. Then again, I may never come back. Goodbye Melbourne, and thanks for all the potato scallops.