Getting Out of the Bubble

Have I told you about the time...I almost drowned my boyfriend? Swimming, in China, isn't really something that children learn as standard. I always found this strange because I started swimming classes when I was 6 weeks old and I absolutely love being in the water. But in China, as in a lot of Asian countries, people don't really learn to swim and every so often a news story will pop up about someone who fell into a river (usually because they were looking at their phone) and drowned because they didn't know how to swim. Of course, some people can swim and I have written about my experience of going to the swimming pool in Suzhou (long story short, everyone in the pool stopped swimming so that they could better stare at me and my friend swimming. It's very unnerving so bob up to take a breath and see a pool full of eyes looking at you.), but my boyfriend in Yinchuan was not one of these people. So when we went on holiday to China's tropical island of Sanya he...

Have I told you about the time...we almost got recruited to a brothel? When Jenny, Jonas and I first moved to Suzhou we were immediately keen in the early days to make some friends. In any new place it is important to find the people who you can connect with, and when you’re surrounded by a totally new and alien culture I think that it is only natural that you seek out those who are similar to you. So we were looking for the expats. It turns out the expats aren’t so easy to find! But we reasoned that if we could find the bar area then we would also find the foreigners – Westerners like to drink right?! We had a couple unsuccessful evenings of dead bars without a foreigner in sight, but eventually we tracked down the name of a bar street that looked to be promising. So one evening we got a taxi and were dropped off at the bottom of the bar street. We had no idea where to start, and to be honest everything looked pretty dead (in hindsight we may have been a little early in the...

Have I told you about the time...I went skiing on a fake mountain? Straight off I will say that there is a little bit of exaggeration in that opening sentence. To call where we went a mountain would be a bold faced lie, it was actually a quite large hill dumped with imported snow (just as ridiculous as that sounds), and as you can imagine any "skiing" that can be done on a quite large hill is limited. But take this with a pinch of salt, it's a much better story that way! On New Years Day, my boyfriend at the time, Orion, suggested we take a little trip somewhere for the day. This was not a particularly unusual suggestion as there is plenty to do around Yinchuan and we often took advantage of the nearby mountains or old movie studios for a day out. But this time he suggested something a little bit different, skiing. I had never been skiing before, but Orion seemed confident so I agreed and off we went to ski. The only thing was that I wasn't sure exactly where w...

Have I told you about the time...I won a catwalk competition? While most of the teachers for Aston in Ningxia province lived in Yinchuan, there were a couple of teachers who were based in the surrounding small cities. These cities were a very different experience to even the very small (by Chinese standards) city of Yinchuan. While Yinchuan is small and didn't have many foreigners, there were enough other foreigners around to make friends and always have people to do things with; but these small satellite cities don't really have any other foreigners and the teachers who were based out there were pretty much alone. This was great for improving people's Chinese and really getting immersed in Chinese culture, but sometimes you need a bit of Western contact! So every so often we would go visit our colleagues out in the sticks. One weekend we went to visit American Dan in Zhongwei. Zhongwei does have the added benefit of being right by Shapotou desert, which I have writt...