In addition to the piece that was published not long after we arrived in Russia, 'Moscow protests: authorities' gloves may come off', Crikey has also been running a series of so-called "letters" from me: 'Letter from Beijing: Reading China like Reading Tea Leaves', 'Letter from Vladivostok: A Bridge Over Troubled Waters', 'Letter from Siberia: Where Lenin and Putin are Everywhere', and 'Letter from Moscow: Where They Wear White Ribbons in Their Hair'. (Some of these titles are slightly different on the site. Unfortunately, you will need a subscription or a free seven-day trial to see so for yourself.) With the exception of the first of these letters, which questions the likelihood of a popular uprising in the Chinese capital any time soon, the other three look at a subject I am more familiar with: the Russian presidential election.

The piece I am proudest of thus far—my best since writing on Cuba's economic reforms two years ago—was published in The Global Mail, a new philanthropically-funded online publication, which based out of Australia but has an international focus. (My friend Jess Hill is its Middle East correspondent.) 'Hoping for Spring in the Dead of Winter' is a rather contrarian piece of reporting from the great expanse of decidedly non-revolutionary terrain covered by the Trans-Siberian Railway. "Travelling across the country," I write in its opening paragraphs, "serves as a useful corrective to both the pro-opposition Western correspondents in the capital and the pro-Putin state media everywhere else." I have also published my first-ever attempt at photojournalism, 'The Human Ribbon', over at Disposable Words. That piece looks at last weekend's opposition protest on Moscow's Garden Ring.

More of what I've written this week will be published in the coming ones, including a piece on our visit to Lake Baikal and Olkhon Island, one about what we can expect from both the regime and the opposition in the immediate post-election period, and blog posts on subjects as varied as Russian election jokes and a day with the Moscow-based COO of a French car company. I am also in the process of writing a few short pieces of fiction inspired by our travels. You can keep up to date with what I'm publishing by regularly checking the 'Recent Articles' section of this blog's right-hand sidebar and its 'New Writing on MatthewClayfield.com' page. Alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Of course, the student from Nanjing wants to make a dollar and a cent in this world, which is why he has wound up, despite the shit it is apparently buried under, in China. He can already speak English and Spanish and feels that Mandarin will give him the trifecta: with the world's three most-spoken languages under his belt, he says, he could do business almost anywhere. We meet him by accident in the lobby of our hostel in Harbin, which he is visiting for the skiing and the annual snow and ice festival, and he is quick to point out how much he likes the city. Demographically Chinese and architecturally European, with Russian-Jewish influences still lingering in the food and urban planning, there is certainly a lot to like about it. Its vibe is perhaps best described as Manchurian, which is another way of saying rather unlike the rest of the country, at least according to the student from Nanjing. "China is at its best when it's at its least Chinese," he says.

The student from Nanjing admits that he has been in the country a little too long. Everyone begins to turn against it after they've been here a while, he says. "One guy," he tells us, "who had been living here three years, finally lost it one night when the owners of a restaurant treated him terribly and then tried to overcharge him for it. He refused to pay and they beat him up." He shrugs. "He should have known better, but I know where he was coming from." A British national, the student from Nanjing says that his first stay in the country was marvellous. In retrospect, however, he thinks that probably had more to do with the fact that he didn't really study than it did with the country he didn't really study in. His mistake was to think that playing hookey and getting drunk with pretty Chinese tertiary students meant he would like living here for an extended period of time. He's now dating a Chilean and can't stop going on about Argentinian steakhouses. "Buenos Aires," he says excitedly. "That's where it's at."

The student from Nanjing's tirade takes place over a bottle of red in one of Harbin's Russian restaurants. We have just returned from a visit to Ice and Snow World, the biggest and best of the city's three annual winter festivals. We were picked up by a fellow in a minivan at three-thirty in the afternoon and dropped off at a McDonalds nowhere near the festival grounds. "The driver says there's a pretty girl waiting for us inside," the student from Nanjing translated, and the three of us went inside and ate fries. The pretty girl rocked up some forty-five minutes later and was not especially pretty. She ushered us onto a waiting bus and we made our way out to the festival. Another forty-five minutes passed once we got there, the increasingly stressed-out girl disappearing for increasingly lengthy stretches, and other tour groups heading straight on in ahead of us. When the now thoroughly exhausted girl finally appeared with our tickets, she informed us to be back at the bus by seven. We left the festival at ten to seven, but the bus was nowhere to be found. As the mercury headed south of minus twenty, we eventually decided to take a cab. "The driver says his company charges an extra two hundred yuan when he picks people up here," the student from Nanjing translated. "He's lying, though. He's going to pocket it." When we got back to the hostel and told the lady behind the desk that the bus had left us at the festival grounds, she called the company to see what the go was. "They say it's still there waiting for us," the student from Nanjing translated. "They're lying, though. They left without us."

His tirade over and his glass of wine finished, the student from Nanjing looks down at the empty place setting in front of me. "You haven't got your food yet?" he asks. Both Mel and the student from Nanjing have long since finished eating. I shake my head and he shakes his in reply. "You should be thankful you're leaving tomorrow," he says. "Russia shits on China."

The first few days of our visit to Beijing found Mel and I in a similar, if not identical, situation. After a wedding, a five-hour drive to Melbourne, and a twelve-hour flight to China, Mel was rundown and contracted a cold the moment she stepped out into sub-zero temperatures. Furious at her ill-timed illness, I demanded she visit the Forbidden City in spite of it, and then forced her to visit the Dong Hua Men night market on top of that.

With only a few hours remaining until we board the night train to Harbin, however, and with neither of us especially wanting to leave the city we have been progressively warming to, it is clear that this was a passing phase. Our very different styles of travel—Mel requiring lots of down time versus my tendancy not to sleep for six months—began to triangulate with our visit to the Great Wall at Mutianyu yesterday. (We spent our time at the wall doing what all travellers do, which is complain about the presence of other travellers at the wall.) Mel's delicate constitution, on the brink of collapse at the best of times, let alone in Beijing's smog and chill, has finally acclimatised to both the weather and my energy levels. I have finally accepted that there are going to be days when I'm going to have to come down to hers. Given the amount of writing ahead of me, I have also accepted that this is probably a good thing.

In fact, the only thing that neither of us have gotten used to are the Chinese New Year celebrations: between the machine gun fire of the firecrackers and the mortar fire of the rockets, you could be forgiven for thinking you were walking around in a war zone. Yesterday night, as we were walking down an alley, someone let off a string of firecrackers in a nearby courtyard and the two of us ducked for cover against the nearest wall. It would be good training for a war reporter. You build up a hard-edged nonchalance pretty quickly.

I don't want to say too much about Hemingway, who accompanied me on my trip through the US and Mexico eighteen months ago, and who I am replacing with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Sorokin this time around. But you will have to forgive me one final mention. My review of Alexander Fiske-Harrison's Into the Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight appeared in The Weekend Australian today. The review, which spends quite a bit of time comparing the book to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, is available online here. My first few pieces from China should hopefully start appearing on Crikey and Disposable Words within the week.

I still have to go and pack for my flight—Rogan Josh turned out to be full of mould and I've been using Rogan Josh II ever since—and I'm not much looking forward to it. I'm leaving Western Australia with far more than I arrived with. As far as my upcoming trip through Siberia is concerned, I have picked up all the essentials while I've been here: the thermals, woollen socks, gloves and glove liners, ugg boots, and a Mandarin phrase book for our week in China. Then there are the books I've picked up—Sorokin and Hitchens battling for supremacy in my bag—which somehow have to find space among all those that I stupidly brought with me. Oh, and there's a new computer, too. In addition to the one I'm typing on, I will also be schlepping back a new Asus Eee Pad Transformer, which will be playing the role of battered Olivetti as I freelance my way through the CIS. (Not that an Olivetti was ever able to download Kindle versions of Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead, of course. Let alone for free.)

My week back in Mount Gambier is going to be an intense one. My time in Perth has been one of the most productive periods of my life. (The only one more productive was in New York City in eighteen months ago when I wrote a feature film and a stage play in three weeks.) In addition to covering CHOGM, writing countless articles for Crikey, and making a sad and sorry living as a content provider for Yelp, I also wrote a new stage play, The Cat, or: Conversations about Dead Animals, and co-wrote the first, thus far very well-received, draft of a science fiction screenplay with my friend Stuart Willis. Stu will be getting to Mount Gambier a day before I do in anticipation of a four-day rewriting period and exactly one week after I get in my brother Josh and his fiancée Kate will be getting married. I also have two more weeks of Yelp reviews to write and want to knock out three more pieces for Crikey. And I'm emceeing the reception, too. As I say: it's going to be an intense one.

There were a number of new and ongoing television series that took up a lot of my time this year. Homeland beat out Game of Thrones as the best new series of the year. (I've just started watching Boss, too, and am already very impressed with what I'm seeing.)

As far as the ongoing series are concerned, Community is still one of my favourites, but it's slipping, struggling with its understandable attempts to stage more of its third season off-campus. While I'm certainly disappointed by NBC's decision to bench the program for the foreseeable future, I also can't say that I'm very surprised. I wasn't entirely impressed with Curb Your Enthusiasm's eighth season, either, and often found myself thinking that maybe the team should called it quits at the end of its pitch-perfect seventh.

From a show that has arguably run too long to one that has not run long enough. HBO's decision to cancel Bored to Death, which has been consistently brilliant since the third or fourth episode of its first season, devastated me when it was announced. In addition to being often riotously funny, the series was also one of the most heartfelt around. I defy you to find another friendship on television like the one shared by its three male leads, and you'll be lucky to find a more unique depiction of New York on television outside of Seinfeld. The best ongoing drama was Breaking Bad, for all the obvious reasons, and one can't wait for its final season to start even as one dreads not having it around anymore once it's over. Forget that final, perhaps too-comic shot of Gustavo Fring in the retirement home, and remember instead his finest moment, south of the border, by the side of a pool.

But the show of the year was clearly Louie. What to call Louis CK's lo-fi one-man production? (He writes, directs, acts in, and edits each episode.) Auteur television? And what to make of his strange, often bifurcated episodes, which resemble Salinger's two-story novellas more often than they do a standard sitcom? Whatever the answer, the show is routinely brilliant, and this season has provided us with at least three classic moments: Louie's confession of unrequited love for Pamela, his full-length rendition of 'Who Are You?' while taking his daughters for a drive, and his awkward reconciliation with Dane Cook while trying to source Lady Gaga tickets. It also provided us with one of the greatest episodes of television in recent memory: 'Duckling', in which Louie goes on a USO tour of Afghanistan with a baby bird in tow.

But the shows I really got into this year were the older ones: Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, and The Larry Sanders Show. Deadwood is probably the greatest television drama since The Sopranos and The Larry Sanders Show is probably the most influential television comedy ever. (Almost every comedy on television today, from 30 Rock and The Office to Parks and Recreation and Curb Your Enthusiasm, is indebted to it.) Battlestar took me a while to get into, but when I did I found that it actually had a lot in common with some of my very favourite dramas: you never quite know what the characters are going to do, but when they do it you realise that they couldn't have done anything else.

This is not to say that this year hasn't had its cinematic and theatrical moments, of course. I saw twenty-five films at the Sydney Film Festival, including Béla Tarr's harrowing The Turin Horse, and and caught a few random pieces of theatre here and there. (Of the few that I saw, version 1.0's The Table of Knowledge was probably my favourite.) As with last year, however, my main experiences with the movies and theatre was writing for them. Where last year I wrote a screenplay (The Debt Collector) and a stage play (Lord Jones Is Dead), this year I wrote a screenplay (Three Girls), a stage play (The Cat, or: Conversations about Dead Animals) and a six-episode web series (Going For Broke). I should finish next year's first screenplay, Payload, which I'm writing with my friend Stuart Willis, tomorrow.

Every year I make a New Year's resolution to read a book each fortnight. Last year I fell three books short. (I would have only fallen two short had I gotten through the last chapter of Castro's My Life on my last day in Havana, but I didn't and had to leave the book behind, as it didn't belong to me.) This year, unless I can finish Vladimir Sorokin's The Queue by midnight tonight, I will have fallen four books short. (I am part of the way through Christopher Hitchens' Arguably and Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky's The Age of Assassins: The Rise and Rise of Vladimir Putin.) But what a line-up of books I managed to get through regardless. On the literary front, it was a year of firsts. I read Amis, Baldwin, Bulgakov, Chesterton, Dostoevsky, Green, Homer, Heller, Isherwood, Kundera, Politkovskaya and Solzhenitsyn all for the first time.

There were two books each on the Middle East (Michael J. Totten's The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel and Thomas Cushman's A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq) and bullfighting (Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon and Alexander Fiske-Harrison's Into the Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight). Speaking of bullfighting, I marked the fiftieth anniversary of Hemingway's death with Jeffrey Myers' Hemingway: A Biography, a remarkable and often critical account of the writer's life, which, in addition to providing a useful warning against alcoholism, also emphasises the importance of a disciplined work ethic. The death of Christopher Hitchens earlier this month provided the same warning and the same imperative.

For obvious reasons—I hit Vladivostok in one month's time—Russia dominated both my fiction and non-fiction reading. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment was far and away the best book I read this year. My remaining top five fiction reads also included Catch-22, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Day of the Oprichnik. (My honourable mentions go to Dead Babies, Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel, and Our Man in Havana.) My top five non-fiction reads were Hemingway: A Biography, The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel, A Russian Diary, Into the Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight (my review of which should appear in The Weekend Australian sometime next month), and Christopher and His Kind.

On the day that Hitchens nonchalantly announced his illness on the Vanity Fair website, I was in Kansas City, checking my e-mail for a note from my editor but finding several others from friends, asking me if I had heard the news. I had just visited the National World War I Museum and hadn't, and sat quietly for a moment with a feeling of pins-and-needles in my arms. (I felt the same thing when I read the news today.) I wound up sitting in Pierpont's at Union Station, making my way through a three-course dinner and drinking enough wine and cognac for two. (I finished reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast during the meal.) This was, I slurringly told the bartender, an attempt to express my solidarity through hedonism.

I have previously written about the time I interviewed and met Hitchens and won't reiterate the story here. Nor will I reiterate the reasons we were unable to catch up on my visits to Washington, D.C., in 2009 and 2010. We weren't close, and only ever met the once, but nevertheless remained in sporadic e-mail contact. I would send him a link or an essay I had written, and with as little sentimentality and as much subtlety as possible would express my best wishes and hopes for his recovery. In October, we briefly discussed Houston's Rothko Chapel. (Hitchens was was receiving treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in that city.) I thought he might get something out of the large black panels that Robert Hughes once described as having "the memorial dignity of a funeral stelae". ("They represent an astonishing degree of self-banishment," Hughes wrote of the panels in The Shock of the New, prefiguring Hitchens' final essay for Vanity Fair, in which he wrote that "I feel my personality and identity dissolving".) Last month I sent Hitchens a piece from the German weekly Jungle World about the arson attack on the Charlie Hedbo offices in Paris. "Thank you for thinking of me," he wrote. "Hope the pneumonia has passed," I replied. It hadn't, and that was our last exchange.

I haven't written much in the past about Hitchens' influence on my work and don't intend to do so now. The influence of his Slate pieces on my articles for Crikey is obvious enough. The influence of 'On the Road to Timişoara' will be just as obvious when my long-form report on Central American migration in Mexico, 'Waiting On the Arriaga-Ixtepec', is published in Overland early next year. I first read 'On the Road to Timişoara' two years ago in For the Sake of Argument, my favourite of Hitchens' essay collections. (Love, Poverty, and War comes a distant second.) I am currently halfway through his most recent collection, Arguably, and will write about it here when I'm done. (I say "most recent" instead of "last" because a volume of his cancer essays is already in the works.) I would have liked to have written to him about the book, too, and perhaps to have had him sign my copy. But it's clearly a little late for that. It's also too late to show him the scene of my novel-in-progress, An American Diptych, in which he himself appears:

"I would like to shake your hand," I said.
"Well, I would never refuse to oblige a comrade," Hitchens said.
"Yes, well, that's very kind of you," I said, "but I can't."
"You appear to be crippled," Hitchens said.
"I need a knife or fork or something," I replied. "I have tarred my fingers together."
Hitchens pursed his lips a moment, perhaps conscious of the queue that still existed behind me, and looked around with effort.
"Can we get this fellow a knife or fork or something?" he asked someone in the wings.

Which reminds me that I shouldn't put off my own work before it's too late, either. Arguably, like Clive James's Cultural Amnesia, is very clearly the author's attempt to sum up as he prepares to check out. But summing up what has already been written doesn't mean that one doesn't have more to write. "I had real plans for my next decade," Hitchens said not long ago, "and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it."  I have real plans for my next decade, too, but haven't worked hard enough to earn anything. The best way to express my solidarity today is to dedicate myself more fully to doing so.