Getting Out of the Bubble

2020 will undoubtedly go down in many people's lives as the strangest year that they have ever lived through. The year started with uncontrollable bush fires in Australia and we quickly escalated from one horror to another as a global pandemic emerged. COVID-19 meant that we were all forced to spend a lot more time at home and people had to find different ways to adapt and cope with the huge change to daily life. Some people found it easy, and some people found it incredibly difficult. I consider myself lucky to fall into the relatively easy group. I live with friends so still had that element of socialisation on a daily basis, and I am an inherintly lazy person. I am perfectly happy spending days inside doing a whole lot of nothing. But even for me, there is only so much Netflix I can watch so I had to put my energies into other projects. To me the obvious thing to do was focus on cooking projects, and to branch out a little bit. And I did! I

I am the bad cook in my family. When I was younger jokes were always made about the time that I confused teaspoon and tablespoons when putting baking powder in the pancake mix (I was 8!!) and it kind of stuck. It might be partially because my family has so many good cooks in it. My mum is the queen of making the most simple dishes taste incredible and inventive cooking. She's the mum who cooked soufflés for us as babies and always made killer school lunches and weeknight dinners, despite working full time. She's also the kind of person who hates eating at restaurants very often because she thinks that her food is better (and a lot of the time it is). My dad is fantastic at the gluttons food, he makes all those comforting meals that are firm favourites and make me drool; roasts, casseroles, curries, decadent desserts...the list goes on. He grows his own chillis and "gigantoes" (giant tomatoes) and bakes bread a couple times a week. My sister was always the s

Have I told you about the time...I learnt martial arts? If I said that I did martial arts in China I don't think people would be that surprised. After all, who doesn't think of Kung Fu or Chinese martial arts when they think of China?! But my anomaly was that, of all the highly trained kung fu masters in China, I learnt from a white guy. Jake is one of the most interesting people I met in China. He and his lovely wife, Becky, were some of our colleagues at Aston in Yinchuan and had come over from the US for a bit of adventure. Jake had a fascination with Asian culture and threw himself into the cultural experience. I really respect the way that he would practice his Mandarin with everyone and anyone while I stammered and hid behind my Chinese boyfriend. Jake also was really passionate about martial arts and was even developing his own style which I believe was a mix between MMA and wing chun (correct me if I'm wrong Jake!). Jake kindly offered anyone who wanted to l

I love the ritual of Chinese New Year. I love how it is a time for reflection and cleansing (both physically and metaphorically) for the year ahead. I love how families get together over vast meals steeped in tradition. And yet, in China, I never actually celebrated Chinese New Year. I can now look back and say that when I spent my two years in China I was young and naïve about all the amazing things I could have experienced and enjoyed. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy and experience a lot. A hell of a lot. But there were still so many things that I now look back on a wish that I had made the most of. I wish that I had taken up my ex’s mum when she offered to show me around the Chinese kitchen and show me how to cook (this will always go down as one of my biggest regrets, I would now kill for a few days in the kitchen in China with someone who could teach me to do all those things that you can’t really learn over the internet. But I also wish that I’d experienced Chinese New