New Arrivals

Our apartment is facing directly opposite a pet market. It's quite strange that I only discovered it was there while shopping for houseplants, only to find a big blue macaw on a perch in the same room as about a half dozen chickens, some caged budgies and cockatiels, and a goose. Random. 

It is actually not a very nice place to be. In China, as with any developing country, pets are treated as as stock rather than respected as living beings. It's a hard fact to ignore sometimes. Last week, I found a kitten about the size of my palm in a bush outside my apartment compound. It was crying and crying so I wrapped it in a towel and took it upstairs only to find the little thing was covered in parasites and had badly infected eyes. I took it to the vet who said it was too sick to survive and would die painfully on it's own if it wasn't euthanized. Needless to say this was a shitty day for everyone involved, especially poor kitty. There are some organizations in Shanghai to help with the massive unwanted pet population but it runs on donations/volunteers and animal shelters are a pretty new and foreign concept in a country that still has sick and starving people to deal with. 

The mammal population of these "pet markets" are in a pretty sad state, but the fish are just strange.

This is not my picture, but they have the same ones here. They inject pockets of ink under the scales of the fish to make designs in their bodies, or in the case of this photo, Betty Boop fish. Not all fish look this ridiculous. They also sell all types and sizes of goldfish, tropical , and saltwater fish. 

Anyone who has met my boyfriend will know his strange obsession with Clownfish and yesterday we took the plunge and adopted two tiny babies, an anemone, a crab, and a whole lot of weird little mermaid flowers. This is the tank. The anemone is that orange blob in the front and the crab is in hiding.

This is our little clowny, Schumacher

And this is Button (Formula 1 drivers)

I hope they will be happy in our house. They already cuddle and rub each other at night and never swim far from each other. Apparently this is called "hosting" and eventually they will become a mated pair. Awwwwwwww!!!! <3

1/2 of Box of Cheerios is $7.50

Today Tony and I spent 50 cents on both of our lunch! It was a steamed bun concoction called 'bao zi' which can have all manner of things stuffed inside of it. Ours were stuffed with cabbage and noodles, and another with tofu and spinach. We tend to stay away from the meat options of any street food as I am a veggie and we both want to avoid three days of the shits. 

This is just one example of how cheaply you can survive in China. I'm also trying to keep some familiarity and nutritive value in our food by cooking at home a lot, using primarily Chinese supermarket stuff. Last night, I made Mexican black beans with my own salsa and sour cream. It was delish and I am a genius.

We have had to say goodbye to a lot of foods we love. They are either unavailable or extortionately priced. The pot of sour cream was the most expensive part of the meal at $5.50, as it's considered an import product. We haven't really had any dairy since we arrived, save for Tony trying every brand of yoghurt on the shelves in order to satiate his weird cravings for the stuff. Milk is a bit dodgy as they do some weird Chinese chemical thing to the cows and 100g imported block of cheese costs more than my daily commute to work, so it's essentially bye-bye dairy. Finding a good loaf of bread is like trying to find a unicorn. Chinese people put sugar in everything. I bought a loaf of bread labeled "Rye with Date Products." I bit into it expecting rye bread with dates, instead it was essentially chocolate cake with dried cranberries and chocolate chips. It was good and I ate it, but it lied to me. I still want whole wheat, toasted, with butter, not costing the price of a new laptop. These are the sacrifices we make. OUR BREAD IS CAKE PEOPLE!

There is a fun side to having a completely different supply of products to choose from at the supermarket. We often buy random fruits, candies, and drinks to see what they are like. Sometimes they are great, and sometimes they look like candy but are actually strips of dried, unidentified meat rolled into shiny foil wrappers with a fun little cartoon man on the side. Tip: In China, you can never judge a food by it's misleading description/appearance. Some things I have tried (these are not my pictures):

A sports drink containing the sweat of the "Pocari", whatever that is.

 

This fruit smells like pee. Do not eat, unless you like to eat pee.

This is actually fried wood-ear mushrooms. Very yummy, unfortunate translation.

Candied sweet potato. Really good.

In conclusion, upon traveling to China, or any country abroad, try everything and see if you like it (after risk assessment, if it looks dirty, do not consume). It might end up tasting repulsive, or it might be the most delicious and moderately priced thing you have ever eaten.

Cheerio!! xx

Our New Place

 Some videos of our place.

I feel a bit sorry for cockroaches. They look so unassuming and they have no idea they are not welcome in your home, scuttling up the curtains of your bedroom window. The next time you find one in your home, I suggest doing what we did and providing Mr. Cockroach with trade instead of imminent death. One hot air balloon ride from the 5th story in exchange for his vacating the flat immediately. Simply tuck him inside a discarded plastic sack, the ones that the bolts from IKEA come in works nicely. Open your window and let him fly into the wind. 

Anyhow, apart from invading creepy crawly friends, our apartment is assembling nicely. We repainted over the hand/snot marks on the wall and went to Chinese IKEA twice, which is MENTAL. Imagine a fusion of regular IKEA and a Chinese supermarket. Now double the amount of people inside on a Sunday. Now imagine all of them hanging out on the furniture, sleeping on the beds, and lounging on the sofas like they were in their own homes. Now add a an inability to queue and funny chinglish toilet paper dispensers in the bathroom explaining how this paper is "not from tree, but from life." I hope I have painted a vivid picture  of what our home furnishing experience has been thus far. 

Fortunately, our place is now almost painted, furnished, internet connected, and clean. It is situated right under the metro line and is just down the road from all of the foreign food shops and restaurants. It also has a spare room complete with sofa bed, awaiting it's first victim...I mean visitor, mah sister.

So, job? Check (I'll tell you about it in another post). Apartment? Check. Now we are just waiting for our visas to finish processing...dum dee dum dum dum and then (hopefully) check. After all of that is finished, I want to do some serious catching up with ya'll. I'm thinking...mid- September?

Sending love and humidity from Shanghai xx 

Return of the Chinglish

In case of emergency, please form an orderly line here to pay for your groceries

Who needs IKEA? For all of your household furnishing needs, make your way to "Hotel Thing Confluence"

Tired with conventional and unfashionable glasses for the blind, Helen Keller took matters into her own hands.

Sugar, no boys allowed!

Stinky Tofu

Ni Hao!

The eagle has landed. Actually, we landed a week ago but I anyone who knows me knows that under the effects of jet lag I become a lobotomized lump of what used to be me. Now, well recovered, I am back in China and doing a lot of reminiscing, such as walking into a grocery store and remembering the brand of soupy fat free yoghurt I used to buy in Da Qing. I am also trying to absorb a lot of new information about where places and landmarks in the city live and how close in accordance we would like to live with them.

No matter how many times I leave a place and start up new somewhere else, relearning my surroundings is always the hardest part. It took the better part of two years to learn where everything was and how to get to it in London and now it feels as though I was never there at all. The only souvenir I have is the English guy sleeping next to me (sorry mom) on the air bed in his brothers apartment. 

My Chinese is coming back so quickly and my iron stomach is once again being put to the test with the many weird, wonderful and appalling foods I've been offered. Ever wondered what a fart actually tastes like? I don't have to anymore. I've tasted one in the form of a food actually named "Stinky Tofu." Other oddities I have sampled and actually though decent are dried jellyfish, salty bamboo, and wet peanuts. Yum. Good thing Shanghai also has a plentiful array of western restaurants. I might have jellied noodles for breakfast but at least I can have a Greek salad with garlic bread for lunch.

Today is serious apartment hunting day.  Previous attempts have sent us into a bit of an emotional trauma as the places we visited looked like they were being used to hold midnight dog fighting sessions and smelled like stinky tofu. Fingers crossed we find some better prospects today or else we may end up having to camp in the public park. 

I officially have one job. In September I will be teaching English to 6 year olds  for four hours a week. I am going to start  looking for something else to supplement the hours but it's a start at least, and the pay is good.

Things are kinda sorta coming together and as our first week in China comes to a close, I can kinda sorta start seeing what kind of life we can put together for ourselves here. Of course, being China, it could all change tomorrow. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Here are some photos of our trip to the gardens in Hangzhou.

 It was monsooning heavily.

Big Buddha

   

See You In Shanghai!

It's today. After all of the anticipation, discussion, debates over what to pack, vacuum sealing (SO FUN!), cleaning and preparation, we are leaving! At 11pm we will depart  Heathrow Airport and with a quick stop-over in Mousekawitz Russian(not it's real name) aiport, arrive at 11pm the following evening in Shanghai.

Last time I left to work in China, I brought a backpack with exactly two shirts, one pair of shorts, a toothbrush and my camera. I was calm and confident and strong. This time I am packing two suitcases full of "just-in-case" clothes, respectable interview uniforms, kitchen supplies, and binders full of boring papers regarding various boring elements of my life. Essentially, I am traveling like a bag lady, sans empty soda cans. I am traveling like an old woman.

Well, I guess with old age comes a sense of clarity about how I want my life to be. I want Tony with me, I want us to be happy and secure, to never lose the sense of adventure and look back on all of this one day and smile. I think we're off on the right track with this China business. 

So we're going to get off the plane in Pudong and start searching for my job and our apartment. That is step one. Wish us luck. I have never had experience dealing with a Chinese rental company, and I think we will need lots of it, and patience...and a few bottles of alchohol.

Goodbye London! Hello Shanghai! 

There is No Point to Life, So You Better Make You're Own

The first few years of my twenties was spent in a pretty dark place. I had seen friends die or have their lives damaged by horrific accidents, I was suffering from chronic depression and anxiety, and was living with someone who couldn't handle or support how heavy I had become while juggling his own issues. In those circumstances, some people break down but I ran...to the other side of the world. For a long time I believed only the first part of that title sentence to be true. 

One night I was in the hostel bar in Beijing with a bunch of people from everywhere in the world, and I had had more than my fair share of drinks. Someone I was sitting with started getting all metaphysical (as you might do after copious amounts of booze) and asked that age old question "What is the meaning of life?" I responded with "There is none." This brought on a ton of questions about God, purpose, the afterlife etc.... Then is old Dutch man pulled me aside and asked me what I was doing right now and what plans I had for the future. He told me that he very much agreed with me. There was no purpose to life, but I was failing to see the freedom in that. He asked me if I still felt rewarded for doing great things and hurt when I was upset. If I did, I should live selfishly, humanly, and find the rewards in life before I lost my emotions. It was a bit like a chapter out of a Paulo Cohelo novel. I look back now at that hazy, boozy night and that conversation is the only part I remember with any clarity.

It seems that lately, everyone I know is in a flux of change. People are moving across the country or world, traveling, having children, buying houses, losing weight, getting new jobs, getting married, finding themselves in a far, far away part of the Amazon.

I hope they are all happy in their choices and finding their rewards as I am finding mine. I still maintain that there is no point to living, but I don't say it with a dark cloud looming over my head. I say it because to me, that sentence means freedom, choice, happiness, and endless possibilities. There is no point, so make one. 

Happy moving Justin! I will miss you! Please remember that one of the purposes of your life is to make me delicious Christmas Coffee!

Crazy Chinese Stuff That Makes Me Laugh

My sister has just booked a flight to Shanghai. It will be her first time in Asia and it has me thinking about places I will take her to see when she is over. It also has me thinking about how in a country like China, day to day observations are as important  as The Great Wall. There is some fairly amusing stuff going on in that place, which deserves at least an amusing shake of the head.

My friend Kevin, who still lives in China, wrote on his Facebook page "watched a woman wearing very tall platform stiletto heels, on rather uneven paving, playing badminton...clearly the common sense jar was empty when she was made!" This sparked me to compile a few memories of things that made me snicker, and things that, to me, made China a bit more...China.

At the top of my list, the most obvious one is driving. People in China drive like kids playing Micro Machines on the carpet. Cars coming from every direction. Beep! Beep! Crash! Bang! Carry on... . It's just because in China, there are no real road regulations. You get a car, buy a license (maybe take a test?) and GO! It's funny to watch until you need to cross the road (or someone gets smushed).

Discovering "Chinglish (Chinese-English)" is one of the best parts of shopping or ordering off a menu. Foreign people actually have websites devoted to topping each other with their finds. One of my favorite moments is when I was in a park in Shanghai reading park rules, to find that "DO NOT FRATERNIZE WITH THE SQUIRRELS" was sternly bolded and underlined. Damn those evil, plotting squirrels... I don't know if they just have really crap translators or are using Google Translate and getting the direct meanings, but I hope it never stops.  

Other gems discovered in my travels:

"Hot Oily Bacteria (stir-fried mushrooms)" on a menu 

"Mix my Welt" on a random shirt

"Hospital for Cunt"  You can guess...

These aren't mine, but will give you a general idea of the possibilities for discovery

Have you ever walked down the street and fantasied that everyone would break out into some kind of massive, public choreographed dance? Well in China, all of your High School Musical dreams can come true. Just go to any public square at around 6 or 7pm, and behold a bunch of people doing something perhaps a little less punchy and a little more traditional, but still entertaining. It's actually quite nice when they get the fans and costumes out. Because Chinese people work A LOT, they use their evenings as down time to go to the public squares to socialize, play badminton, eat red bean ice pops, and boogie down. It's like yard time in a low security prison.

 I am pretty sure that any sub-par health standards would have a restaurant shut down in minutes in the Western world. That's the wrong attitude in China, where every restaurant gets a chance and every hungry patron gets a choice. A night of  stomach wrenching cramps and watery poo is not on the shoulders of the place where you ate, because you should have looked at the little sign with the face stuck to the window. Think what you will, but I think this system is genius, compellingly honest, and equals cheap eats if you have a cast iron stomach like me!

:) = Probably okay to eat here

: | = Take your chances

:( = It might be cheap, but you will pay in other ways

I can't wait for my sister to see this stuff in person. I also can't wait for her to point out to me all of the things I might walk past everyday which don't seem odd/hilarious anymore. You tend to get a bit accustomed to things after a while and they lose their entertainment value until someone points them out to you again. But don't worry sneester, we will only eat at places with a happy face in the window. :)

This Bloody City

Dear London,

We've had a good run. I have laughed with you, cried with you, sang, danced, cried some more, and passed out on the gentle caress of your sidewalks. I have minded your gaps and played in your parks, and have memories which will entertain and haunt me for life.

I also excuse a lot of your misconducts. You are a big city, full of bodies and noise and smog and traffic. I get it, but I can no longer abide some of your crooked ways. This is is me venting. 

This is me listing 5 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU:

1. Chavs: 

For the male population, think Jerry Springer guests dressed in Adidas, knifing each other in broad daylight in public parks and on buses. The ones that work, work at supermarkets or sell drugs, and the ones that don't work live off government benefits and degrade society. The female population is generally the same save for most don't work and instead pop out babies because the more kids you have, the bigger the house that the gov't will give you. Most are racist. They all talk funny.  I don't usually care who does what in this world, but they are not all confined to one place...like Surrey. They are on my train to work, at the park where I take the kids, and gathered on street corners when I walk home. I am afraid I am coming off like an elitist here so I have included a short film to help you get a better sense of the everyday nature of the chav.

2.  People Who Talk Like Adele: 

It came out of the blue, uninvited. This accent that is nothing like Angela Landsbury. Nothing like Colin Firth. Nothing like I was promised. When I first moved here, I moved to East London and did not bring a phrasebook, which they should advise you to purchase at the airport. I don't mind this accent in small spoonfuls throughout the day, but ALL DAY and I have to turn on reruns of "How I Met Your Mother" at the end of a workday, the equivalent of washing my cochlea. Another video for you because if I try to imitate it, it just turns "Poppins".

3. National Health Care: The NHS. Yikes. I know we complain back in Canada about the quality and speed of our health care system. I think the citizens of every country, in every universe complain about healthcare. But here is an eye opener. If you think you are deprived of possessions, go to a village in Ethiopia. If you think your healthcare system is poor, get sick or broken in London. My doctor is the one I have to go to because he works in my catchment area. My doctor is an old Indian Man who does not "deal with lady issues", employs a nurse who cannot speak English, and a receptionist who speaks like Adele. He has yet to give me proper treatment or advice for anything I have seen him for and sent me to the free clinic like a tramp to get birth control. Friends who have gone to their doctors have seen similar circumstances, doctors who refuse to test them, treat them, and don't believe they are in pain. This is because in London, NOBODY practices preventative medicine. They won't test you for anything unless they are sure that you have it and it is too expensive to refer you to anyone unless you have a bulbous growth expanding from your hairline. Nobody even gets their teeth cleaned, which explains this:

 Kidding!

4. People Who Act Like Cro Magnon Man In Transit: Trains were invented about a hundred years ago, inspiring other such forms of transit such as cars, buses, trams, etc. There is a certain set of guidelines for using each which pertain to the comfort and safety of each passenger/pedestrian. In London, all bets are off. The bus drivers will see you coming and shut the doors in your face. People on trains will not rearrange themselves to create more space for you to get on. The pregnant, elderly, and disabled are just as much at odds with the rest of us when it comes to finding a seat. You will be pushed, groped, sneezed and sweated and coughed on, and scowled at if you need to be birthed through a vaginal canal of bodies to get off and on the tube. I was once actually pushed back onto the platform after I started shouting "They do it in India (I was talking about how many people they cram onto buses there)!" You are an inconvenience and other people start to inconvenience you. Drivers turn without using blinkers, will not brake for babies or animals, and you cross the road at your own peril. I can take bad driving in China...that's kinda their "thing," isn't it? But I cannot tolerate it in a country which is supposed to be developed. SUPPOSED TO BE.

5. Everything is Wrong All The Time:  And lastly, I HATE, absolutely HATE that I have come to refer to London as the perpetual city of "No." I think generally, Londonese people need to be sold on everything. The mentality is " No, I think this is going to be shit, if you can prove otherwise, you will be gratified by my mild attitude change. Because it's never good, it's just not bad". I am waiting for the day when something is amazing, without a hint of sarcasm.  Subsequently, the people of London love saying "no." "No you can't do that, No, you can't register here, No, you can't return it." Only after 10 minutes of controlled argument do I find that I usually can do what ever it was I wanted. They just wanted to assert themselves first before letting me be a special exception, for which I should be grateful. This goes hand in hand with a Londoner's love of moaning. These people love to complain about everything, which makes me want to complain about them, which causes them to complain about bloody immigrants who can go back to their own country if they don't like it, which makes me think that negativity is a vicious, inescapable, an very apparent part of the culture of London. It is ingrained in the people and makes them a part of this city. Understanding it had made me feel a part of it too. I guess I am a little Londoner now. Thanks for including me, you big rainy smog-hole.

Trying to Find a Hobby That Doesn't Make Me Poor or Fat.

Never in my life have I ever been cash strapped. It put it down to luck. Lucky that I had parents who could indulge my childhood whims, lucky that I grasped the concept of saving quite early and managed to put quite a bit away during high school, lucky I got hit by that car on Blue Mountain Road(thank you ICBC) and lucky that I was able to save during my sentence in Northern China. All of those little pools of cash acted as my launch pads and got me from place to place until I ended up here. In London. Where money get's hurled into a vacuous black hole before you even get to wave a tearful goodbye. 

I cant actually blame it all on London. I was doing alright in my moldy little basement suite, eating nuts and seeds and walking twenty feet to work every morning. Then I wanted to move in with my boyfriend and he had slightly  higher expectations of our living conditions. Ha. Now not only do we eat proper food three times a day and sleep in a bedroom where you can't squish the walls, but I have to use public transit everyday. All of those things are expensive.

Also, we both like to travel. My idea of traveling is to stay in the cheapest hostel, only do things that are free/cheap and eat from market stalls. Maybe you'll get diarrhea but maybe you'll still feel satisfied knowing you have saved enough on your trip for the train ride home from the airport. My lover does not like to do any of those things. The things he likes to do are much nicer and and also cost more money.

What I am saying here people, is that being in a relationship has played it's part in making me poor.  I am not blaming Tony at all. Actually the opposite. I blame myself for nesting all over the place. Maybe it's my inner Italian mama, but I get this strange sense of satisfaction from giving him a meal consisting of all the food groups in proper portions. I love the IKEA show room we have assembled together in our flat. I love indulging him in organic bath products and seeing how excited he gets over the shower nozzles when we stay in a nice hotel. Some of you may ask what the hell is wrong with me and I don't really know. Maybe I'm in love? 

<3 Tony <3

Well, screw you love. Stop stealing my money.

So as it happens, I don't actually want to screw love, and as it also happens, we are moving across the world in 44 days and we have to do life all over again when we get there. This requires a supple amount of start up money. So we are now on cash lock down. No unnecessary spending is allowed. Our food budget is slashed and our entertainment budget is nill (Canada Day is the only exception). So to refer you back to the title of this post, I need a hobby. I have 44 days left here and that is a long time to be sat around twiddling my thumbs and there is only so many times I can clean the house before my windpipe starts to corrode from all of the household cleaners. I need a hobby which does not make me poor or fat. I am currently open to (serious) suggestions. Here is a list of things I greatly enjoy doing but make me poor/fat, so please do not suggest them:

Baking and decorating cakes: fat and poor

Watching "Four Weddings","One Born Every Minute", and "Come Dine with Me": fat (and broody)

Scrapbooking: very poor

Seeing awesome/amazing/life and perspective changing things in London: poor

Reading: It doesn't make me fat or poor but I already read loads.

Thank you in advance for your suggestions and for looking out for me because in the words of the guy who wrote "Fight Club": All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring. 

Please help.  

I Need It?

Getting ready and gearing up for the voyage to Asia-land, I am once more forced to be reminded of how few possessions I actually...possess. I have started taking inventory in my brain of things that must be sold, donated, given to others, trashed, burned, and forgotten. 

It seems only yesterday I left for Thailand with Jess. The contents of my bag included two tank tops, one pair of shorts, toothbrush, camera, Malaria pills, a bikini and a bunch of underwear. For the sake of measurement, I call this level zero (the bare essentials for life as a stinky, hairy travel rat). Then onto China where a bikini would not be choicest item to wear in -30 degrees, and seeing as how clothes were so cheap and sparkly, I couldn't help but amass a wardrobe full by the time I had  to leave. This is when the first round of my ownership awareness took place. EVERYTHING I owned was not going to fit in my little Thailand backpack, nor the cheapo Chinese suitcase I bought for the occasion. I had gone beyond level zero to at least a healthy level 5 (The stuff I brought with me, plus winter essentials and many pairs of jeans...mostly sequined with some sort of grammatically incorrect message sewn into the butt pockets). I have a bit of a shopping problem.

It's at times like this when I think back to my teenage years, my closet vomiting clothes on itself, a sea of t-shirts and jeans so deep that it disguises the colour of the carpet. I remember my mom tearing into my room like a wild bison, two horns prodding each pile of clothes, bringing them up to my nose so close I am afraid she will gore me. "DO YOU USE THIS?! DO YOU NEED THIS?! WHY DID YOU EVEN BUY THIS?!"

Thank you Mom. Unwittingly, these violent moments have bestowed me with one of your greatest seeds of wisdom, how to get rid of your shit.

"Do you need this?" is probably the most helpful phrase in history when it comes time to part with possessions. It didn't mean "I NEED this blazer, it goes with those grey pants I have." To me, it meant "I NEED  this winter coat. It's fucking cold and I will get pneumonia if I don't have this."Using need as a gauge, I was ruthless and I fit everything important inside my bag, with room to spare. If I could implement this philosophy into my eating habits, I'd be a rake.

Having done this once before, I am quite happy to part with a large trash bag full of clothes long forgotten, books, nicknacks...etc but what I am realizing as I go along and make this inventory list is that now I have a lot of memories in the form of stuff. A little elephant from Thailand, photos and notes from my kids in China, the little light that Tony bought me from IKEA, the wooden fish I got for the kitchen as our first house decoration. I was in the midst of trying to find a balance between being ruthless, sentimental and practical. I couldn't bring myself to cast away kilos and kilos of the stuff I want to treasure. "Need" was starting to take on a different meaning and it is no longer a fail safe method for packing a bag.What I NEEDED was a different approach.

I told all of this to someone recently and she replied "the things you own end up owning you." I know she meant it in a negative way, but I couldn't help but think "genius." We've got 6 weeks to go before we need to pack our bags, and it's going to be a pain in the ass, but every little thing we bring is going to count. It's going to travel with us and tell our story and then tell it to us again one day when we've forgotten. Our memories are going to own us and represent us, even it means many painstaking hours of folding everything mini sized and vacuum sealing our underwear to fit it all in the suitcase. And when the check-in clerk at the airport asks me if I packed my bag myself, I'm going to think of a really, very witty response.

Let's go Round Again...

For those of you who don't know or those who understandably can't keep track. I am a wandering Canadian. Born in the suburbs, raised by a lovely and large family, and had never gone further than the mall, which is barely 4km from my front door. I left home to do the standard backpacking experience in South East Asia, ended out with zero dollars but a definite taste for the new, exciting, and possible.

Determined not to go home, I ventured to China and found a teaching job in a little city called DaQing. Having no prior experience with anything Chinese except for eggs rolls, scary driving, night markets and Sushi (which I later found out is strictly a Japanese thing. There is no Asian samey-food grey area), I accepted the position at Joy School gladly, in the midst of a hot Siberian summer. I was excited to meet my students, make friends, make money, and take opportunities to get out of the city and do a bit of sightseeing.

I did do all of those things. My students were great. In fact, they worshiped me like the Caucasian Goddness of Joy. When I walked into the classroom they would seriously give me a STANDING OVATION. I did make friends. Chinese friends who taught me most of the Mandarin that I learned and showed me where I could buy toilet paper and Western friend who showed me were to get drunk and escape China for the night and buy cheese. I made money as my income was significantly higher than the cost of living . Infact, I managed to save,  pay off my Visa, get my nails and massage once a week, go out for meals almost everyday, and go on plenty of trips: Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Qingdao, and Inner Mongolia.

Though there were many too many amazing moments to count, the general day to dayness of living in a country that has their own set of laws, morals, cultural beliefs and language was getting to me and by the end of my almost two year contract I was burnt out. I couldn't take the spitting, the staring, the weekly bouts of food poisoning. The happy freedom in ignorance that I had when I first arrived was gone and I knew then that the right thing to do was leave.

I didn't want to go home. Home was the place where nothing ever happened and truth be told, I was beginning to get addicted to the feeling of a fresh start. I started thinking about places I could move on to. I didn't want to struggle with the language barrier anymore and I wanted to keep traveling. I started thinking on my Euro trip that I took when I first graduated, and how it didn't go exactly to plan and all of these reasons led me to London, with a quick stopover in Ireland with my friend Jess from Canada. I found a job as a Live-in Aupair for a lovely lady and her son. I lived with them for a year and in that time, I took every opportunity to do and see almost everything London has to offer. Bars, live music, art shows, trips to the sea, trips to the North, castles, plays, weekends abroad in Europe, markets, niche shops and streets. I met lots of interesting people and took part in some really random stuff I've never done before like flash mobs, cabarets, freaky nightclubs, free hug days, 10k runs, fundraising for the homeless by sleeping outdoors and entered myself into some slam poetry competitions (and won!).

I was totally and completely outside my box. In DaQing, I started learning about who I was in a quiet and reflective way. In London, I threw myself into every possible situation I could find because honestly, before then I didn't even know myself what I liked. Of course, being out doing something every night and weekend in London, two things started to happen, my money went down and I started to lose interest. I just didn't have the interest or energy to go and see a nude art show or some other random thing on the other side of the city. It was then that I started to feel the same way that I had in DaQing, burnt out. It scared me. If London, with all of it's novelties, newness and possibilities for exploration couldn't keep me, I wondered if I could ever be satisfied. I started to wonder if I had spoiled myself, given myself too much and it was still not enough. Why is everyone else so happy?

I'd been alone for the entire length of this journey. Even though I had friends, even though I had started out initially in a relationship which ended after South East Asia, none of them really knew me. I am very good at keeping my own secrets and keeping everyone from my family to my friends to my lover at an arms length. It is very hard for me to let others see me. I often read quotes from Christopher McCandless (AKA Alexander Supertramp,) the guy who went "Into the Wild." At the end of his life which he has lived isolated in the forest, when he is dying of dehydration and poisoning,  he finally admits to the world that to him "Happiness is best when shared." I don't know if it was his desperation  and fear of death that made him admit this, but I know he is right. At the time the words spoke to me.

August 13th would mark my second year in London, but I'll be gone by the 10th. I'm moving back to China with my boyfriend and the one and only love of my life, Tony. He has been offered a job in a college there (his bro and family also live there) and I am hoping to regain work as an ESL teacher in a kindergarten. We're being very grown up and trying to pay off debts and save money for a house. I never thought my fate would lead me back there but I know this time it will be different. Tony and I will be able to talk to each other about our experiences there, and rub each others tummies when we get food poisoning. I'm going to be more open with my family and friends (via Facebook and this blog) and take some uni courses to speed my way into becoming a teacher. We've got a long road ahead of us together and I am excited for what it will bring. We have started thinking about what we will leave behind and things to bring so that we can still live in a semi-familiar environment in China.

So there. My entire life in a nutshell up to this moment, where I am sitting at this laptop in my little house in London, being happy sharing the happy and drinking some Chinese tea. Next post will be shorter, I promise. x