So this blog of mine, whose title hints at a fairly extended stay in China, actually starts on day 20 of the journey – because jet lag, exhaustion and a lot of 6 AM starts and 10 hour bus journeys have gotten the better of me.

So we start in the middle, on a fairly quiet day, but one that has actually given me a fair bit of thought.

To give a quick overview of what I’ve been doing so far, I spent a quiet day in Beijing on arrival, then met up with the delightful MA student group I was co-shepherding* (who had all just gone through a delayed flight and a replacement transfer through Hell, poor sods). We had an intense and adventurous** stint in Datong and the mountainous area just south of it, which I’m hoping I’ll blog about at length. After tiring the students out (and getting them started on a nasty baijiu habit), we packed them off to Beijing and had a few packed days of travel right across the Great Wall into Inner Mongolia. There I was supposed to leave the group and leisurely meander south towards Taiyuan and Xi’an in time for a summer school… only to end up joining the group in minibus-ing across three provinces back to Beijing for some work meetings. And then I took a night train back to Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, and then on to Ordos, where I was on the morning I started this post.

….are you still with me? Good, I promise I will elaborate in later posts on that weird list of names up there. For now there will be just a few short posts on the last few days.

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* which is to say I mostly waxed lyrical over the loudspeaker…

** “How many major northern Shanxi Buddhist can you cram in a day?” you ask, and ask you may, but we had to ask ourselves that question in a crowded minibus at the end of a 10km traffic jam, having not had any warm food that day, whilst crying.***

*** The answer is four, four temples.