Still Alive

Okay, so due to a combination of a lack of internet access, two small American-Mongolian children with a fondness for playing 'jail,' a long late-night conversation about poisonous animals with a guy in UB and a session of beer and Pulp Fiction in Beijing, I have singularly failed to update the blog in a whole week. This means, of course, that I will now go into turbo-speed blogging overdrive and there will be eleventy gazillion posts in a single day. Apologies again for the rather schizophrenic update pattern.

Anyway, the slow train has now finally reached its destination (although as I'm lazy, the blog name will remain the same for the next six months), and after traipsing across the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, a bit more Russia, Mongolia and China, we're now finally in Chongqing, where the last two days have been spent relaxing in our frankly luxurious apartment, eating terrifyingly large amounts of food, having comprehensive 'medical tests' to check that we're not a threat to the Chinese nation and enjoying our first visit to a Chinese karaoke bar.

Whilst it's very tempting to dive straight into writing about Chongqing, I shall resist the temptation to create blog chaos and instead ask you to pretend whilst reading the subsequent posts that the last week is a figment of our collective imagination. As such, it is now in fact Saturday, February 21st and I have just arrived in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia....