Getting Out of the Bubble

This year Easter and the Chinese Tomb Sweeping Festival (Qing Ming Jie - 清明节） happen to fall on the same day. This meant, for once, we were on the same holiday time as the West and actually had part of the weekend free. For me this also meant that my boyfriend and I had a full day where we both had time off from work. To take advantage of the situation Orion and I decided to head to the Helan mountains (贺兰山) just outside Yinchuan to do some hiking. Despite being from Yinchuan, Orion has never been to this part of the mountains so when we met up with Jake and Becky and set off (after a Tomb Sweeping lunch with Orion's mum) it was an adventure for everyone. I had expected that our hike would be made up of trails and steep steps but this wasn't tourist hiking, this was literally scrambling up a mountain. For a while it looked like there was a path that was going to lead us onwards and up, but then that crude path sort of dissolved until we were standing at the bottom of a vall...

The hardest thing about moving to China hasn't been the culture shock, or the teaching (although neither of these have been total walks in the park); the hardest part has been learning the language. Learning to communicate is an essential part of integrating in any culture, first to get by and be able to do the regular day to day things that make life possible, and then next to get to know the people of a country and experience it on another level past tourism. For me languages have never come easy, no matter how much they might interest me. I spent a lot of my school career struggling with French, Spanish, Latin and Ancient Greek, and I spent many a lunch time making up vocabulary tests that hadn't gone so well first time round. At school this never particularly bothered me, I managed to get through by exams and I can go to France or Spain and get by as a tourist. My Spanish is even a little better than that and I can start to communicate. But none the less languages prove...