We have just come back from lecturing to the Students at the Wuhan, University of GeoSciences, a couple of hours flight out of Beijing. Ahh, you say not the most obvious place in the world for fxphd to be lecturing. True, I grant you it sounds odd, but it turns out it is a big world and there are millions, no billions of people that are not living in the obvious capital cities of the world – and some of them have progressive and interesting film schools. Wuhan is one of those places. The University is building a film school and has some great government support to build up this area. Come to think of it in Sydney the University of Technology had a cool film school when I was just starting out, so maybe film schools have some affinity with technology research centers.

We spoke for over two and a half hours to some 200 students, who were some of the most animated and well informed students we have spoke to on this trip. Normally Chinese students take a bit of time to warm to actually asking questions but not these guys, they took off. They have a lust for knowledge and it seems a good sense of what it will take to break into the industry.

The night before we had allowed ourselves one free night to try and have a spectacular meal. Of course in Beijing this meant Peking Duck. We consulted the local post community via chinadv.com – and got the name of the same restaurant that everyone else had mentioned, so that was a good sign.

Now you have to hand it to some companies they know their market and they deliver. This restaurant was six floors, as we pulled up the head hostess load balanced us to the right floor – to avoid waiting in queues, but kept each floor full enough that you felt like this was the clearly THE best floor and you kind of felt sorry for the other poor souls on the less popular floors. Of course Beijing’s Quanjude at Hepingmen had been serving folk like us, ok well maybe not like us, but customers since 1864.

When you have duck in China, little goes to waste. We had duck webbing (yeah the feet bit) in a mustard sauce, Marinated Duck liver, Flaming Duck hearts, and my favorite – Duck tongue dumplings, which were sublime. This all went extremely well with our Kuaijishan Huadio Rice Wine. But all of this was just the trailers before the main feature: the Peking Duck itself. Slow roasted in a clay fire oven. Our Duck – the 1,115,689th the have served since opening (I have the certificate to prove it) – was wheeled on to the dining room floor with Surgical precision, a metaphor helped by the surgically masked chef who carved the succulent bird with a knife so sharp that most real surgical scalpels would look at it in the locker room with envy.

Being one of only four westerners I had spotted since arriving, I of course took photos and acted like a complete tourist, which brought a grin to our immaculately dressed waitress 0909 (there are so many waitresses, their badges just had numbers).

So you might wonder how it is that I can do an Anthony Bourdain and take time out of my busy, jet setting, digitally captured and white balanced in post – lifestyle to write restaurant reviews? Well the truth is dear reader that I am currently drinking crappy airport coffee at Wuhan airport waiting for a delayed flight, while our producer madly reschedules our shoot this afternoon to accommodate our soon to be absent status. Ahh the joys of travel. Still with any luck we can still get to Beijing to film green screen kung fu tonight.

And for the record, I think the pancakes are thinner and have a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ from Matthew’s Peacock Garden’s Crows Nest Sydney. Ahhh home.