We've left China, sob :-( After almost exactly a month there I'd really grown to love it. Before we got there I was a little worried. I didn't know what to expect. There is a lot going on in China, especially the politics/censorship etc that's not great to say the least (My blog stats were censored can you believe it! Obviously I'm dangerous...), but day to day at the level we were interacting with the place and the people, it was great. I suppose most people there are just getting on with living their lives and don't really get involved. It's difficult though. We spent some time working in an English school which gave us the opportunity to speak to young Chinese people and even in the short time we spent with them some really interesting issues were coming up. It would be great to spend more time there and really be able to see things from their perspective. The last couple of weeks in China were spent down in the south with a trip to Hong Kong and a couple of it's islands and then a week stay at the English school in Yangshuo. I have to say I think ...

A new craze is set to hit the nation! Working it's way across form the East it's a revolution in restaurant dining. The Beijing Hot Pot not only provides a tasty warming treat to share with friends and family, but in these hard times it's the simplicity and price that is pulling them in. The idea is simple. The Hot Pot is essentially a big bowl of water heated to boiling point by placing a container of red hot coals in the centre. A simple stock mix is added which may be of spring onion, ginger and garlic. Customers order the various ingredients to go in, which they add as and when they like. Popular choices are mixed mushrooms, various vegetables, tofu, and noodles. These are allowed to cook for a few minutes before being picked out and dipped in a sauce before eating. The stock in the pot also turns into a tasty soup as the various vegetables and mushrooms are gradually cooked throughout the meal. This alternative style of eating not only keeps the customers amused it also cuts out the need for chefs to prepare the cooked dishes as the customers seem more than happy to do it ...

We arrived in Vilnius at 5am after an uncomfortable night of broken sleep and numb body parts on an overnight coach from Warsaw. The journey had been going well, we'd managed to get the whole back seat to ourselves and I'd been asleep for a couple of hours but at 1am I was woken suddenly by a scary lady slapping my legs and shouting at me. I guessed she wanted me to move up, so I moved over to sit with Andy and for the remaining 4 hours it was all but impossible to get back to sleep. The lady in the chair in front was rather large to say the least and every time we went over a bump, which was about every 5 minutes, her chair bounced back with the weight an banged into my knees. I thought the whole chair was going to collapse and she'd crush me. What a nightmare. We made it alive though and luckily our hostel, the Old Town Hostel was not too far from the station. We dropped our bags off and had a snooze in the common room until our room was available. The room turned out to be really nice. Practically a ...

We left Berlin from the Hauptbahnhof station which is absolutely incredible, like an enormous machine with trains on different levels and a central kind of hub of shops, escalators and lifts criss-crossing above and below you. It was all really well organised as well, you could pretty much guarantee the train was going to arrive exactly the minute it was timetabled to. The train itself was pretty cool, quite old school. We were in a carriage with two other people, one of which kept trying to talk to me despite the fact I clearly had absolutely no idea what she was saying. Going to have to get used to that I suppose. It was funny, I think crossing over into Poland was the first place I've been that really seems very different. An announcement would go off sounding like someone shouting something very important, but you would have no idea what. And every half hour or so a guard would come round to check you tickets, again shouting something completely incomprehensible. We saw this great sign by the emergency stop devise. Loving the translation. Before we left we'd joined couch-surfing and Warsaw was to be our first go at it, so ...

For the next couple of months Egg But will be switching back to a kind of foody travel blog as Andy and I have finally set off on the big tip we have been planning for so long. We've been on the road now for 13 days and are currently in a beautiful snowy St Petersburg meaning stage one of 'Big Trip' is complete, so it's definitely time for a post before we head off on the 86 hour train ride from Moscow to Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian. We've really been having a great time, and so much has happened though I'm not sure where to start. I guess it's best to just start from where we began, in Paris and some pretty exciting news. We spent the first couple of days in Paris with our friend Bruna wandering around aimlessly and drinking incredibly expensive beer. With an exchange rate of practically 1 to 1 the average price of a drink was about £6! And that was just for a half! Ouch. This was more than made up for though with the amazing magical atmosphere of Paris at Christmas. The Champs-Elysees had a Christmas market running the length of it and the ...