Hurtling Towards the Wild-ish West

At last! I’m almost on the train which will bring me to Lanzhou, transport hub of the northern provinces of China, and thence to the innermost reaches of inner inner everything, as far from the sea as it’s possible to get.

I’m doing it all in the name of research – have to immerse myself in Putonghua for a couple of weeks to be one step ahead of my lovely Dutch geezers A Ke, A Te, A De and A Fu.   

The problem is, Xinjiang being so remote and actually a foreign country, the locals’ Mandarin (Putonghua) is almost unintelligible! Excellent. The things I do for my students.