Getting Out of the Bubble

After Hangzhou,  our journey took us down South to Xiamen and the neighbouring island of Gulang Yu. The 7 hour train was relatively painless and we eventually found our hostel after taking an 100¥ taxi and navigating a warren of tiny alleyways. Xiamen Old Town Hostel is tucked away in the market backstreets of the old town in Xiamen, right in the heart of the city and proved a fantastic base for our explorations. The benefits of staying in the midst of a sprawling market are fairly obvious (easy access to food!) but the tangle of streets was confusing and we were told even locals could get lost in them! The threat of getting lost wasn't any deterrent when it came to exploring though. I think I could have spent many more hours ogling the various stalls and discovering an entirely different side to Chinese cuisine.  My favourite thing about Xiamen was, hands down, the food. Being a hot paradise by the sea meant masses of fresh seafood and tropical fruit were readily available...

After our train ride in the comfort of first claas, the first thing to hit us when getting of the train was the humidity. We knew as we headed south it was going to get hotter and more humid but I wasn't expecting it to happen quite so rapidly! This heat didn't help when we were confronted with an hour and a half queue to get a taxi. Heavy bags, humid heat and long queue are not the best combination but the wait wasn't too bad and we finally made it to our hostel at half 10 at night. Our stay at the '4 Eyes Backpackers Hostel' has been overall really positive, even if the nights have been puntuated with drunk Americans stumbling in in the early hours. It's a cute little wooden hostel up in the hills of Hangzhou. Hangzhou as a whole is very green, and our area was no exception. Surrounding us were green hills and tree lined avenues; a welcome change from the highrise apartments of Suzhou and Shanghai. Right next door, nestled amongst the trees, was a seemingly fl...

This week we have said our goodbyes to friends and places in Suzhou and started on our grand adventure across China. For the next 2ish months we will be living out of backpacks (that weigh almost as much as us) and soaking up as much of China as time - and money - will allow. For the next week and a half, we are winding our way down to Guangzhou to meet friends and then spending July travelling up to Beijing via what we've (rather arbitrarily) decided are China's highlights. Once we hit Guangzhou our plans become a little hazy, but until then Jenny and I have a plan! Presented in the least elegant way our plan is: Shanghai - Hangzhou - Xiamen & Guang Yu - Fujian Tulou - Guangzhou. Look it up on a map, it's not a bad start to an adventure at all! But for now our journey starts in China's most metropolitan city, Shanghai. This was a gentle easing into our journey; we'd been to Shanghai before and sort of had a feel for the city, but don't think that meant ...

This week has been a bit of a weird one for me. At the end of last week I was making the most of the high of sucessfully making it through a term teaching, and loking forward to being able to relax and plan our next adventure of travelling. However, the celebration was short lived, as it turns out I hadn't actually finished teaching (classic China, nothing happening quite as expected). Friday afternoon I received a call from our agency telling me that I was now working Monday to Wednesday in two schools giving demo lessons. Oh. Never mind I had made exciting plans to go to the zoo Monday,  my teaching hat was apparently remaining firmly on. I was told to meet Wendy outside our appartment at 8am Monday morning to see the schools and then Tuesday and Wednesday I would be teaching. On the bus to the first school Wendy told me a bit about what I was going to do; first she told me the schools were very far away (excellent) but it was the next thing she told me that concerned me mos...

As our placement comes to an end we've had to make decisions about the next stage of our journey and I thought it was easiest to let everyone know what I'm doing by putting it all down here. So here it goes. When I came to China I never imagined that I'd enjoy teaching so much, I knew probably wouldn't want to go home to get a monotonous office job but I thought wanderlust would take over and I'd play nomad until I ran out of cash and be home for Christmas. But the longer I spend here the more I love my students and my job. It's a cliché but it really is so unbelievably rewarding to now be able to have semi-conversations with students who could barely say "hello!" when I started at the school. It's fun to watch them learn and its still exciting when a lesson goes really well. Even though I only realized, 13 weeks in, that a huge chunk of my students were calling me 'Daniel' (because that was the name of the last foreign teacher at the sc...