Well, I am home now; and as a substitute for a real post, I thought I would some up a few trivial statistics of the trip for posterity:

• Total distance travelled: 21,929 Km (Air: 18,256 / Train: 3,529 / Ferry: 144)
• Items lost: 2 (1 pair of jeans and 1 jumper)
• Photos taken: >4000 (worth keeping: maybe 500)
• Strangest meal: Dog soup washed down with Snake 'wine' (in Keasong, DPRK)
• Most surreal experience: Crashing a 5 course meal at the Meridien in Shanghai and sitting next the Italian vice-consul.

Note: As you have probably noticed, I have also removed my daily progress map from the main page (I expect to be in Sydney for the foreseeable future) but you can still find it on google here.

Just back at work for the first (well second, but first productive day) and working through my blog backlog when I found this moderately amusing mock ikea manual (original post here).

Apologies for the abscence of updates for over a week now - no I wasn't literally Shanghaied, I simply went slightly upmarket (a 3 star hotel) for a few days and so lost my hostel internet access, and have been catching up (drinking too much wine) with recent (from my North Korea jaunt) and older friends (from years before back in Sydney) in Hong Kong.

There were however some very funny experiences to share, particularly from Shanghai. The best one, which I don't have time to detail here (as I am packing for Macau tomorrow) involves sitting next to the Italian sub-consel after freeloading my way on to a 5 course dinner at the 5 star Le Meridien within 5 hours of landing...

Anyway, for those of who were moderately worried about my whereabouts: I survived Shanghai, have been in Hong Kong for the last 2 nights, and am spend Friday/Saturday gambling my life away in Macau, before flying home to land early Monday morning. I can only assume the dearth of comments on my posts over the last few weeks is a sign of how intereting and thought provoking they were and not a reflection on how few of how small my audeince is... :)

Signing off (for this trip) and looking forward to seeing you all again in Sydney.

I have read in various places that the Chinese, like many asian cultures, are a very group-orientated lot but also have a predilection for displaying status through, often ostentatious, public gestures such as buying far too much food at banquets; well, if you subscribe to this theory, you will find no better source of material for your PhD than Beijing nightclubs.

Having only sampled 3 so far (Mix, Vics and the beatifully named GT Bananas), I would love to be the owner of any of them. I will use Bananas as my example:

Bananas describes itself as: "Blending a Hollywood theme with that of a luxury space shuttle, this 2000 capacity, 3,000 sq. meters club has made a name as one of Beijing's better megaclubs with a consistent house music policy accented by visits by top international DJs."

On entry you discover the entire place has been carefully segmented in to semi-private alcoves perfectly formed for housing the standard nocturnal Chinese social unit (2 boys and 2 girls). From this point on extensive table service is provided removing the need to leave your newly acquired territory. Not only does this structure cater to the group based psyche - it also provides numerous menu items that it would appear are designed purely to demonstrate your extravagance in the most public way possible - from fireworks in your champage bucket to intricately engineered shot stands and 2 foot high sculpted fruit platters.

Due to the only symbolic partitioning of the boundaries to your territory - you are easily able to see the spending of neighbouring groups - encouraging an arms race of consumption between you all to the point of ridiculousness and convenient profit to the establishment.

Of course I may just be imagining all this.

Note: I actually started this post 2 weeks ago, when I was in Beijing, but never finished it. Since then, the evidence of clubs in Dandong (where the fruit platter again reigns supreme) and Xian (where the dancefloor in a 500+ person nightclub only needs to hold 50!) backs up the theory.

I have made it out of the DPRK and am back in civilisation in one piece.

After a night in Dandong (China's 'biggest border town') celebrating the second half of my birthday with a lot of very warm beer in a nightclub with a spring-loaded dancefloor! I caught an overnight train to arrive in Beijing this morning before catching another train out to Xian this evening.

Needless to say, there are many stories to be recounted from the last week or so; sadly they will have to wait as more pressing matters such as my laundry have to be completed before I catch my next train. I do have a few photos to add to flickr (here)...As you probably can guess, DPRK is very keen to manage its representation in the foreign media to the minutest degree and as such 'interesting' photographs are hard to get. Not only are the guides quite strict about where they will and won't let you photo...

• Impersonal monolithic statutes/masolueums and other 'feats' of juche = ok
• Everyday images of Koreans riding bicycles, sitting in the park, or any other daily activitiy = maybe
• Train stations, construction sites, military in uniform (even the chicks with their best makeup on) = big no no.

...But, in our case, this is backed up by a manual (ie bag empty and rummage) customs inspection on leaving the country which involved an image-by-image examination of everyones digital camera's. Luckily I had the sense to separate my more surreptitiously taken pics from the acceptable ones on two cards and to put the safe in the camera for inspection. The camera customs guy was also distracted by a 1:125,000 map I had of the peninsula in Korean that his colleague wanted to confiscate from me to go all the way through my camera. (I managed to argue a good cause of innocence and get my map back after all). Some of the others did get pictures deleted, one guy even had a whole undeveloped film taken off him.

Just as I am leaving Beijing I have noticed a new kid on the block challenging the fuwa's dominance of street billboards...yes it is the paralympic cow 'fu niu lele' (no relation to NeNe).

Apparently you can tell a lot by a person by the way they treat animals...If the same is true about a city and the way they run their zoo, then I may be going of Beijing.

Granted, most of the place was built in the 50s, but considering the massive investment that I have seen in almost every area of Beijing to ensure it presents a 'modern' face to the world over these few weeks it certainly highlights where the zoo comes in the city government's priorities. But then again, the bureaucrat are not the only issue...

Despite innumerate and prominent 'do not feed the animals' signs (in Chinese and English) at almost open-fenced every exhibit I witnessed either parents or teenage boys (trying to photograph their child or impress their girlfriends) by either taunting the animals or teasing them with nutritious fare like processed cheese sticks. At first I had thought it a shame so many cages were featureless sealed glass and concrete, but at least these creatures were spared the junk food and poking.

Of particularly poor order, and odour (of stale urine ammonia), was the big cat 'enclosure'; a wide range of tigers, a panther, a siberian tiger and a pair of lions were all housed alone and continually pacing up and down their concrete boxes that were barely twice their length square!

Anyway, I have posted a few snapshots here (including, the obligatory Pandas).

Apparently the 5 little 'friendlies' or 'fuwa' which are plastered all over Beijing to the point where I am sick of seeing them are called: Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying, Nini. Their names, when joined together, are a Chinese pun on 'Welcome to Beijing' - why wasn't this explained to me once on Channel 7!