Getting Out of the Bubble

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 ...

You may have seen over the last year or so that my life has become a minor infatuation with Chinese cooking. I'd always loved Chinese food but, except for a short cooking class in Chengdu, I'd never really dabbled in making Chinese food. All of that changed this year when I decided to do a dinner party of 10 of my nearest friends. After that evening I was overwhelmed at what a big job cooking a Chinese feast really is, but also realised that I had found something that I genuinely loved to do. For a few months I kept cooking at home and working my way through Fuchsia Dunlop's amazing cook book " Every Grain of Rice ", but I still couldn't get rid of the nagging feeling that I wanted to do something with all this cooking I was experimenting with. I liked cooking it for myself but that was nothing compared to cooking for other people. The idea of starting a supper club kept popping into my head, but it all seemed a bit self-indulgent and ridiculous. Friends...

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...

Anyone who has talked to me about China will know that one of my favourite things about living there was the food. As with pretty much everything else in China, I arrived thinking I knew what to expect…and then being completely wrong. I mean, we all know what Chinese food is like right? Chinese is a staple in the takeaway canon – crispy duck and pancakes, sweet and sour chicken, prawn crackers…you can’t go wrong! But this isn’t really Chinese food as I knew it in China. The first thing to say is that the Chinese are serious about food, eating and cooking is a huge part of daily life and most business, family time and social occasions are centred around food. A good example of how integral food is in everyday life, it’s not unusual to be greeted with 你吃了吗 nĭ chī le ma? (Have you eaten?) instead of the traditional hello. As with everything else, the food in incredibly varied within the different areas of China. Each area of China has their own specific cuisine with its own unique styl...

(APOLOGIES IN ADVANCE FOR THE TERRIBLE PICTURE QUALITY) I have mentioned before how nothing is ever as easy as it should be in China, but this is even more true when travelling. The combination of the language barrier and an over-crowded transport system makes getting anywhere a task that can often be overwhelming. Travelling in a big group really highlights how well some, and how badly others, can deal with the difficulties of Chinese travel. The volume of luggage a person has seems to be the major defining factor in determining how stressful a person is going to find travel. When I was travelling around China, I managed to pack well for making my life as easy as possible. My bag may have been pretty heavy to carry on my back, and it may have been annoying hanging a second backpack off my front, but travelling with my luggage was pretty easy. When luggage space is limited my bags fit easily into smallish spaces, and when the station is a maze of steps I could get up and down them...

Today you are going to learn about how to drive in Sri Lanka. There are five rules of the road... Luck - you have to be very lucky for no one to hit you Honking - no one listens if you don’t honk Break - this is very important to be able to stop very quickly Four Eyes - you need to have your assistant to see the road that you can’t see. You need four eyes. Confidence - with all these things you need confidence, then you can drive in Sri Lanka! This was the first thing our guide told us about Sri Lanka as we set out on a day of driving through the country. Safe to say my seatbelt was securely fastened from that point forward. Sri Lanka was fantastic because it is so unlike anywhere that I had even been before, it’s an amazing fusion of history, culture, religion, nature...everything that you could want in a holiday! I went to Sri Lanka with pretty much zero expectations, the reasons for choosing it as a holiday destination were vague to say the least. Once deciding that I...

When booking a holiday or flights what do you look for? The nicest hotel, the maximum time to explore your destination, the cheapest trip? I think in this situation a lot of people will say that they want a cheap trip. After all, most of us have a budget that we're working with. Cheap sounds like exactly the way to do things and the saying "cheap and cheerful" springs to mind; but the saying that "you get what you pay for" also springs to mind. For every amazing budget-friendly trip I'm pretty sure almost everyone has that story about how that cheap and cheerful option wasn't quite so cheerful. So this leads me on to my main thread of thought... Maybe you think  that you want cheap flights, or a cheap holiday, but in fact what we are desperately searching for is a value holiday. Or at least that is what I've learnt at my new job as an international travel consultant with Flight Centre. During my month long training for Flight Centre we ...

Whether you've been in China for 2 weeks or 2 years I can guarantee you will have noticed the little things (and not such little things) that are completely different to at home. These differences aren't necessarily bad, but they are something that you need to take in your stride as someone living in a culturally opposite society. These are the things that you're going to remember in years to come, and these are the things that can start conversations with other foreigners your meet on your journey in China. In a way they are the make and break element of living abroad, because if you can't accept the culture for what it is, you're never going to be able to stay long term in the country. When I first first came to China I made a friend who helped me to start this list of the weird and wonderful differences of life in China. It started off as a bit of a joke, a silly back and forth of text messages, and at the time I wasn't thinking of encapsulating it on here...

Being back the UK is nice. I've been able to spend time with friends and family, who I haven’t seen in years; and I've really enjoyed catching up with people. But although I am technically back , it doesn't feel like I am back and part of my mind is often on China. I have been re-jigging Getting Out of the Bubble and part of that has meant looking over old posts and trying to categorize them into some semblance of order. Reading over old writing has always been something I enjoyed, I've always liked going over old diaries and laughing at how much (and sometimes so little) has changed. Over the next few weeks I'm planning on going back in time to some of the parts of my time in China that I never posted blogs about; some will be posts I started but never quite got round to finishing, some will be completely new posts to fill gaps in the journey. For now I will just share this list I made before leaving China that documents my time in China in what I think ...