Getting Out of the Bubble

As some of you may know I am flying back to the UK on the 2 nd February after almost two years in China. The question of how long for is too hard to answer right now, but I will say it’s going to be for an extended period. I won’t go into too much detail as to why  I'm  coming back but I will say that the catalyst was graduate schemes. Everyone (in the UK) knows that a graduate scheme is the best way to get a leg up when starting a career; they have higher starting salaries, more responsibility and much faster progression than regular entry level jobs – not a bad deal overall. At university I lazily applied to whatever took my fancy and got through to a couple assessment centres but then that's where my grad scheme journey stopped as I changed tack and went to China. The plan was only ever to stay 6 months, but here I am 2 years later and still in China. It's not a terrible thing that I'm in China, it's actually great! I have a fantastic quality of life th

A few posts ago I wrote about how cold it was getting in Yinchuan, and what it was like to be in a permanently freezing environment (Read it here ). Then the week after I wrote that, 6 of us went to Harbin, and it turns out we didn't even know what cold was. Harbin is one of the most north-easterly cities in China and if it is known for anything it is known for being really really  cold. Every year Harbin is host to the Harbin Ice and Snow Festival, and it needs to be cold if huge snow and ice statues are going to remain standing for almost 3 months. When we decided to go, we knew it was going to be cold (we'd been keeping an eye on the weather reports for weeks) but nothing can prepare you for minus 30 degrees Celsius cold. I've been to Iceland so I had been in serious cold before; but in Iceland we never spent too long outside, in Harbin we were trying to cram everything into 3 days so we were outside all the time . Saint Sofia cathedral It's hard