China

I ended up in Xiaoshan after all.

The flight from Newcastle was late, leaving me with a ten minute dash from aeroplane to aeroplane at Dusseldorf. After a long three hours at Munich, I got on the Lufthansa flight to Shanghai to find that the in-flight entertainment was made up of a tatty magazine that I'd already read in ten minutes flat and two cack American films shown on an overhead portable TV screen located directly behind the head anyone wandering up and down the aisle. I hit the spirits and managed to get some sleep.

China on the way from the airport: heat; building sites, building sites, building sites; endless concrete flyovers; a sky with real clouds, not just an ecru haze; motorcycles on footbridges; big black cars with tinted windows. The driver's English ended at 'Welcome to China' so I had a bit of shut-eye and then enjoyed the action on the road. When the traffic was moving freely, cars ping-ponged from lane to lane - overtaking in the hard shoulder, indicating left, then immediately right if the first lane looked as if it might be clearer after all. Like pensioners jostling in a post office queue. Then the traffic would slow to a near crawl and the road would turn into one of those puzzles I had when I was a kid where you had to slide small squares around to make a picture; cars squeezing in and out, in and out of small spaces, always further away from where they wanted to be.