Note for native Spanish readers: This blog has been written in everyday English and contains phrasal verbs and colloquial expressions whose meaning you will probably not know in many cases. For uninterrupted reading, it is best to study first the vocabulary section at the bottom of the entry. The blog will also feature the [...]

But the first doubts didn’t take long to surface. I soon realised I was going round and round one towering block after another in increasing despair in the scant natural light that remained. Suddenly I was in a street I didn’t recognize. It was packed with atmosphere and colour. And people. I was taken [...]

I was a fish out of water, like a mermaid without a rock. People were crawling around me like ants. Most of them would have furnished me with the key  information I required in two shakes of a lamb’s tail but I just couldn’t crack the communication code. I must have been in a [...]

The space boffins cry out the to the universe in the dead of a cloudless night in some remote mountain-top observatory in the Rocky Mountains or somewhere in the back of Europe. I thought, Christ, if I can`t get the guy standing next to me to understand me and he IS there, he’s virtually up [...]

Ni hao here, Ni hao there, Ni hao everywhere. But I was getting nowhere! My bags were becoming heavier and heavier but like some modern St Christopher I bore them stoically. I must have looked like the village fool to most law-abiding Shanghai citizens as I kept stopping people and asking them if they were o.k (ni hao, ni [...]

Two middle-aged couples stood next to me. I frantically, albeit brainlessly, pointed to my plastic shopping bags with the indoor market’s name on them and all four people   in an impressive display of teamwork pointed in unison in that direction no doubt, where else? Shopping, shopping! I was so flummoxed at this stage that [...]