I once went to a Latvian Velodrome...

Perhaps unsurprisingly when you have a group of disparate nationalities in far eastern exile, a lot of time is spent talking absolute shite. This is partly because a group of people ranging in age from 22 to 43 and of national extraction embracing Canadian, American, Irish, Scottish, Dutch, English and New Zealandish don't actually have that much common ground.

Quite a lot time is spend talking about DVDs (Heroes, 24 and Will and Grace feature frequently at present), other time is spent planning putative trips to the Great Wall or the Lama Temple. There is also occasional discussion of the fiendish, inscrutable schemes of the Chinese Government.

The latest manifestation of this took place before Christmas - a small earthquake off the coast of Taiwan resulted in 95 per cent of China mainland Internet traffic grinding to a halt or stopping all together - it seems that all east-west on-line communication goes through one small tectonically vulnerable pipe in-between China and its territorially vulnerable neighbour.

Domestic traffic was unaffected and so the on-line forum pages of That's Beijing ( a sort of Time Out for Beijing, but with more ads for cute but financially challenged Chinese girls seeking well-off Western sugar daddies and less for lesbian pottery evenings) became home to Conspiracy Central - a hotbed of of our colonial cousin's theories as to the Real Reason why they couldn't access MSN.

The theories seemed to centre around the belief that the Chinese government somehow had something Big and Sneaky planned for the early part of 2007 but to achieve their wicked moustache-twirling aspirations it was vital that any 22-year old TEFL teacher from Ohio should be unable to upload pictorial cultural juxtapositions of themselves and less well-off Chinese folk on to their blogs.

Normal Service has now been restored, no doubt leaving the fuming inner circle of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) sat around slamming their firsts onto their boardroom table and exclaiming: "Drat and we would have got away with it all if that backpacker from Ottawa hadn't been able to email his mates humorous details of English language mis-spellings on the menu of a restaurant immediately adjacent to his YMCA!"

Actually, some of the mis-spellings are reasonably humorous (although admittedly insufficiently so to topple a single-party state with a highly entrenched power base). One of the common mistakes is the confusion between "crab" and "crap" with "Fried crap meat" on the menu often providing endless amusement for incomers.

The crap/crab one is so common that it can only be down to one of two things:
a) Mischievous and under-paid menu translators sneaking a crafty one past their unsuspecting (and unlikely to pay) employers.
b) An uncommon commitment to honesty by a cusinally-challenged restauranter.