365 days later.

One year ago today, I moved to Paris. A year later, my blog draws to its natural conclusion. I'm back in Blighty, on a permanent basis this time, surrounded by my family deep in the deepest depths of exotic Hampshire. This is the 48th post on this blog (I’ve managed to write a lot more than I had expected that I would when I started this blog!). It’s also going to be the last post, for the obvious reason: there’s no more year abroad to blog about! Sad, sad times :( 

To business, then! This post is going to be a bit of a soliloquy, really. It's a post that I've been thinking about and writing, on and off, for quite a few months now, and the more I enjoyed my year abroad, the more I added to it. It’s become a bit of a love letter to the last year, if you like. Call me a sap if you like, I don't care.

302 days after I moved to Paris, 401 days after I started this blog, my life in Paris came to an end on 28th June 2014. And now, with my return from China, it’s official. All told, by the time I arrived back on UK soil on August 6th, I had spent 341 days as an official year abroader. Not quite 365 days, but I think, quite close enough. My (not-quite) year abroad is over.

And after all that, what can I really say? Sojourn to Chengdu aside, which I have already blogged about in six separate posts this month, my year abroad was really all about la cité d’amour that is Paris.

It really is such a beautiful and charming city, with a lot of character, and it’s not difficult to see why it is somewhere that so many people dream of visiting, it really isn't. Building on something I wrote to this effect back in February: I still prefer London as a city and as a place to live. Snap me in half like a stick of rock and London would probably be written there, I just love it so much. It’s also a gorgeous city, home to my favourite place on the planet, and has its own fair share of excellent restaurants, fascinating museums and historic landmarks. It’s the place I gained my independence, the place I have made most of my friends, and the place which has had a large impact on who I am becoming as an adult. It’s exciting, and fast paced, and a perfect balance between old and new.

I was always super excited to go on a year abroad and come to live in Paris – who wouldn’t be? But perhaps because of this love that I have for the British capital, it took me longer than it perhaps should have to really appreciate Paris as it should be appreciated. The turning point was somewhere in the middle of February, but I can now say this with absolute certainty – Paris is always going to be equally as special to me, just for different reasons.

Going clockwise, from top left: the canal at Versailles; the Louvre; the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, Moulin Rouge, and the Sacre-Coeur

Paris was the place where I spoke in French every day; where French was just another language, not a foreign language. It's where nipping into the patisserie for a freshly baked croissant or a beautiful dessert was part of my normal routine. It has a unique charm that I've not seen anywhere else, with beautiful buildings, narrow streets, and a pace of life that is just slow enough so that you can sit back and enjoy life. (Lunch is so much tastier when you sit back and take your own sweet time to eat it, sat outside a café with a glass of wine!)

Paris is the place where it’s perfectly normal for men to hop on and off the metro with their accordions, playing their French melodies as each station whistles by.

True; the administration is slow; the bureaucracy incroyable, and not in a good way. Drinks, with the exception of wine, cost an absolute fortune, and as someone I know posted on their Facebook status quite early into the year;

"…bakeries are run by culinary angels, but beer is drafted by semi-trained monkeys."

Fact of the matter is, I've studied French since I was 4 years old and even with all that under my belt, I was remarkably ignorant, this time last year, about Paris, France, French life. Not so now, and I love all three of those things more than I ever had before or ever imagined I could.

We Brits might make jokes about the French, but Paris – and France in general – is a massive collection of weird and wonderful extremes, of every variety. It’s been an awesome year. One of the best of my life ever (so far, I hope).

I’m so lucky to have had the chance to do my year abroad there. Anyone can admire Paris, anyone can enjoy visiting it, but I don’t think you can ever understand it until you've lived here. And that’s probably true of most cities on this brilliant planet we call home. 

Going clockwise from top left: Champs Elysees, Palais du Luxembourg, the Catacombs and the Opera Garnier

Over the year, I've not just come to love Paris, but plenty of other places too. I've been to the beautiful franco-germanic gem that is Strasbourg. I've been to Dijon, in the Burgundy region. I've been to Berlin, and then there is the month that I have just spent, and posted about, in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province of China.

Fact of the matter is, my year abroad has given me the opportunity to see so many new things and have so many new experiences that so many people my age don’t have, and many people older than us never will. I imagine that living abroad would just get harder as you get older, and add jobs and mortgages and responsibility to your plate.

In Douglas Adam's story Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer, Deep Thought, ponders the so-called "Ultimate Question":

"What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?"

...and eventually decided that the answer is 42. 

If you were to ask that question in reality, I say that the answer to the Ultimate Question is a year abroad. Because the year abroad is an education, about life, the universe and everything. That’s why Erasmus as a scheme and other cooperation agreements between universities in varying countries are so important.

Getting serious for a second, I actually did a bit of research on this point, because I wanted to make my point as effectively as I could, and I found a debate on the New York Times website (links at the bottom of this post), where various people submitted their opinions. For instance, Stacie Berdan and Allan Goodman, co-authors of 'A Student Guide to Study Abroad' write that;

"...[studying abroad] teaches students to appreciate difference and diversity firsthand, and enables them to recognize — and then dismiss — stereotypes they may have held about people they had never met..."

Another contributor, Violeta Rosales, pointed out that;

"[We]… should study abroad in order to realize that we are more alike than we are different… Cross-cultural understanding – the exchange of ideas, information and art – is imperative in a world made smaller by globalization and the internet"

But that's all to easy to write when you think about a year abroad in the abstract. I can speak quite passionately myself on this subject, just more in the context of my own experiences.

Clockwise from top left: Wenshu Temple in Chengdu, the Mutianyu stretch of the Great Wall, Pandas at Chengdu's Giant Panda Research Base, People's Park and the Leshan Giant Buddha

Clockwise from top left: Berlin Cathedral, the East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and the Brandenburg Gate

I look on Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram, and I see photos from people doing their year abroad elsewhere – America, Holland, Australia, Spain… All kinds of places. We’ve travelled, explored, and laughed ourselves silly. We've overcome homesickness and language barriers and cultural differences; we've tried new things, and seen new places, and together, we've got enough photos and tickets and souvenirs to fill thousands of scrapbooks. 

The point I'm trying to make here is that we've had a year in which we've really truly lived, away from the constraints of the education system which for many, me included, is the only thing we've ever really known.

And that’s exactly what it’s all about really isn't it? There’re still so many places in this beautiful world that I want to go and see – I’m very well aware that I have barely even scratched the surface, especially after spending time with some much more seasoned travellers than I in China - but I’m still so thankful that I've had to chance to cover even the small - tiny, really - corner of the globe that I have. I dove into the deep end, feet first, and I don’t regret one single second. Not even the things that went completely tits up. 

Turning onto a different tangent completely: when I think about it, my Law degree has taught me a lot of things over the past 3 years, being completely honest, only a tiny portion of it has been about the laws of the land. The university experience is an education in and of itself, and the year abroad in particular is brilliant in terms of personal development. A year ago, right now, I was completely, gut-wrenchingly nervous. In fact, exactly one year ago as this post is published, I was in the air somewhere above the English Channel heading towards Orly Airport and the unknown – a flat I had never seen, a university I didn’t know, a city I had only ever visited for approximately 6-8 hours as a stop off on a school trip to Futuroscope. So yes – I was nervous, maybe more nervous that I have ever been in my life.

Having said that, I am now a firm believer that the unknown is (or at least, can be), a good thing. I said in one of my earliest posts that I was viewing the year as a confidence building exercise. It’s worked. I am a shy person by nature, but I’m now able to push that to one side and plough on through it. I picked myself up, lock, stock and barrel, and landed in the middle of a foreign capital city where the language isn't my own and where I could count the number of people I knew on one hand. Difficult situations have never fazed me, particularly, but they certainly won’t now. 

Going to China – a country where I couldn’t even pretend to speak the language, or read the characters and where I was really going to be on my own, with no one familiar around, was easy in comparison.

Me, being exceptionally fortunate, without exception. 

That said, I am the first to freely admit that this year hasn't been easy - you only have to read back through this blog and you could probably identify when I was feeling low and when I wasn't, and there were plenty of lows. It is tough, it is difficult, and sometimes I wished that I had never bothered to go away in the first place (these were most definitely half-hearted wishes – I wouldn't throw my year abroad away for anything).

One reason that most people go away – it was certainly an important reason for me – is to improve your language skills. The language gap was also the biggest hurdle I had to overcome.

Obviously, my French has improved considerably. I lacked confidence in my own language skills when I first got here – I just read back through my very first post from Paris, on 2nd September last year, and it was full of doubts. That’s definitely not a problem anymore – I know I can handle most of the demands of everyday life. I’m not, however, fluent, which is what I had wanted to be - and if you go on a year abroad expecting that to be the result, I’m here to tell you now that it’s unlikely, albeit a very worthy aim. (This is partly, I will admit, my fault, for hanging out far too much with other English people). I don’t think in French – ‘Franglish’ is a better description. When I first got home, if I were to say, bump into someone in Asda, my first reaction was to apologise in French. In China, my first reaction was actually French more than it was English (probably because a foreign language felt like the right response, even if it was the wrong foreign language). So, there's definitely been a touch of reverse culture shock. Language wise, though, I’d need to go back for a good few months yet before I could realistically achieve fluency.

Who knows? Maybe one day I will. I'd like to think so.

Left: Strasbourg, Right: Dijon

So - in addition to everything that was said in the New York Times, with all of which I am in complete agreement, I would say that the personal growth is a compelling reason all by itself to go on a year abroad.

This has been the fastest year of my life, and it's been a real journey, one which has helped me prove to myself and others what I'm really capable of. Let's face it; I’m a different person than I was a year ago, in [hopefully] all good ways. I've grown up; I'm more independent than ever, and the boundaries of my comfort zone have widened exponentially beyond what they used to be. The year abroad has opened my mind and I am personally of the opinion that it will continue to do so even after my year abroad is long in the past.

And one day in the future, I will tell my kids about this past year, and what I did and saw, and hopefully they’ll be similarly inspired and will go off and get to do something even more wonderful themselves. The cycle will start all over again – as it should. I am firmly of the opinion that you need to see and experience the world to be able to deal with it.

Last but not least, thanks to everyone who's been reading my blog, whether it was just the one post or each and every one. It's been nice to see the page views on my blog stats gradually creep up and know that people have followed my journey. 

That's it! At risk of sounding like a dodgy acceptance speech at the Oscars, I do need to say a massive thankyou my parents, my brother, my flatmate Parisa, and my two absolute best friends, Ashley and Akeelah, for carrying me through the last year. Couldn't have done it without you. Last but not least, thankyou Chengdu, thankyou Erasmus and most of all, thankyou, Paris, for a wonderful year abroad. 

It's been an absolute privilege. 

Signing off : Au revoir à tous.

Vicky xx

Quotes above may be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/10/17/should-more-americans-study-abroad/ (accessed 30/08/14)

China Part 4: Tianfu, Tinder and Tea

Last time I posted about my mega weekend in brilliant Beijing, but in doing so, I missed out one or two things which happened before that, so I’ll quickly write about that before I go on to week 3.

Two days before I flew to Beijing, a group of us headed back to Tianfu Square (which I wrote about last time) for the Water Show…

“Every evening at dusk, as well as at noontime, an elaborate water show, synchronized to music, bursts out from the square’s fountains and attracts crowds of people during the spring and summer.” (http://www.chengduliving.com/guide-to-chengdu/sights/tianfu-square/) 

Now don’t get me wrong, the fountains were lovely, but you are talking to a person who’d been to the water show at Versailles about three weeks prior, a show which set such impossibly high standards that I’ll probably always be cold hearted and unimpressed at every other fountain show. (Not really. But Versailles was very fresh in my memory). 

Anyway, what was lovely about this was the atmosphere. Crowds of people were gathered, and there were load of little kids running around twirling pretty ribbons on sticks.

And being a big kid myself, of course I had to have my own one.

So me and the others joined the little Chinese kids mucking about in the square, having a good laugh twirling our own pretty ribbons, and attracting, at one point, quite a large audience, which was a bit embarrassing and very amusing at the same time. I think I mentioned when I wrote about People’s Park that people stopped us to take photos – westerners seemed to be a bit of a novelty (at least twice that week I found myself stood by two groups of girls who kept looking at me and bursting into giggles whenever I looked back at them, which was a bit uncomfortable). Anyway, I dread to think how many people took photos of us that night in Tianfu Square.

It was fun, anyway :)

If you read my last post about Beijing, you’ll also know that the whole weekend we were struggling with the heat. Well, we arrived back from Beijing late on the Sunday night and I had to take the Monday off because I was more dehydrated than I think I’d ever been and was feeling extremely rubbish as a result. So the Monday became a bit of a write off, really, as did a lot of that week for one reason or another, although I did have fajitas!

I mention this as a highlight of my week mainly because it was around this point that I realised that there is such a thing as too much Chinese food. Western food is not exactly in abundance out there, and what there was tended not to be great. And so, every day for nigh on three weeks I’d been eating noodles, rice, dumplings, more noodles, more rice, and more dumplings. Then a few more noodles, then some more rice, and then some more dumplings again. It was all delicious, of course, but...

Chinese Proverb*: Two Tons of noodles bring man great fortune
*This may or may not be made up.

You get the picture.

Now I’m home, I’m torn between not wanting to eat Chinese again for some considerable time and wanting to show off my newly found chopstick skills to my parents. I think the former will win out, but who knows?

On Friday night, the PA team had a social at KTV. Now, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this or not, but the Chinese love karaoke. They love it. When Jane and I went over to People’s Park that week, there were karaoke stations set up along pathways, and every five metres there was someone else singing their hearts out. KTV is a dedicated place for this. Groups of people go in and you can hire a room to sing in with your group – no strangers to act as an audience.

I should also mention that I am no great fan of karaoke, and categorically swore before I left for China that I would not be drawn into it. Nu-uh; no way José.

I could hear my parents and my brother laughing hysterically from thousands of miles away.

Still, it was actually quite fun - it quite quickly descended into a lot of loud group singing, of which I have some hysterical and very embarrassing videos tucked away on my iPhone, and we all had a laugh, and that’s the main thing, really (although, if any of my friends are reading this, don’t expect me to give in and go to karaoke with you any time soon. It’s still not my cup of tea). Although, it did make me realise how much I appreciate the smoking ban back home. My clothes were reeking of smoke by the end of the night.

After that, we all went out to a bar for some more drinks, and then to a club called Muse (which was much flashier than any club I’ve been to back home) where not a lot of people seemed to be dancing. It fell to the western contingent to fly the flag, and so we clambered up on the stage, danced a lot, probably got stared at a lot, got invited over by some man for loads of free drinks, danced some more, had a really good time, and then finally stumbled in about 4am, which was a shame in a way, since it meant I didn’t wake up until embarrassingly late and wasted most of my Saturday.

The weekends were the best parts of my time in China, because as valuable as an internship is, who wants to go all the way to China to sit inside an office all day? I wanted to explore *whines*.

So, when we all regained consciousness, a few of us summoned up some energy and headed over to Wenshu Monastery, which is the best-preserved Buddhist temple in Chengdu. I’d tell you when it was built, except that I found three different websites telling me that it was built in three different dynasties, and so I have no clue.

Still, it was very large, and very interesting to walk around, looking at all the statues of Buddha, the flowers placed in front of individual statues, and people lighting incense and placing them in large cauldrons or something similar.

It was very traditional and tourist site or not, really made me think of real China.

Outside the monastery, there were a few local shops and stalls, and a local performer... 

This was also where Noémie and Michela also had an unfortunate (but quite entertaining) experience with durian, which is a fruit very common in Asia, particularly, I’m told, in Thailand. They’re everywhere, so this wasn’t the first time I’d come into contact with it – you can’t miss it, really, as it smells absolutely revolting. I simply cannot emphasise enough how bad this thing reeks - you don’t even need to crack the shell open for this fruit to smell extremely strongly, and I don’t exaggerate when I say it could set off my gag reflex. Jane didn’t like the smell either, and she told me that it tastes exactly how it smells, so I wasn’t about to go trying it. But Bryan, another volunteer from Macau, was with us, and he convinced them that it was lovely and that they really should try it…

Mean trick. They tried it, they hated it, and their faces were absolutely priceless. It was hysterical.

On Sunday, we headed back to People’s Park, where we stumbled across something very, very bizarre.

Picture the scene. You’re stood in the middle of a very large and noisy park. Along one pathway, there are lots of older Chinese people, both men and women, stood next to large easels on which big posters have been set up, full of Chinese characters and numbers, and sometimes photos.

These posters are listing all the personal details of the children/grandchildren of these old folk. And I mean all the personal details.

Age, Height, Weight, Degree, Job, Do they drive a car? What is their salary?

And then people walk around reviewing these posters, and they will do some sums to see if the numbers match up – if they’re lucky according to Chinese superstition, and the like – to see if two people are an acceptable pair, hoping to get the subjects of these posters married off.

It’s a dating service run by your mum, essentially.

Oh, China, you’re so wonderfully weird.

Heading out of TinderZone, as I have baptised it, we walked past a group of men painting Chinese characters on the floor with water, which was oddly fascinating to watch.

Really, when I’m talking about China – and People’s Park in particular - I think my only option is to upload the odd video that I took. Everything is so different, and to me, who before now had only ever travelled in the West, every new little thing like this was a constant source of fascination to me. In any case, I really think that China is not a place to be described, it is a place to be seen, and so my dodgy videoing skills shall have to suffice in the meantime.

We also made sure to have some tea in a teahouse that me a Noémie found the first time we went to the park. I had Chrysanthemum Flower tea, which I didn’t think I’d like, but which was actually surprisingly nice, which might be down to the sheer amount of sugar that came in the bottom of the glass. Some of the other, more traditional teas looked somewhat suspect to me though, and I’m not so sure I would have liked those, although I’m not in a position to judge since I didn’t actually try them.

We also went to the Wide and Narrow Alleys, two old fashioned streets in Chengdu which have lots of traditional teahouses and places to eat. Last, but most definitely not least, I also went to see the Pandas (yay!) but, to do them justice, I’ll write about them in the next blog post (which will also be the last one on China).

By the end of the weekend I only had 5 days of internship and 9 full days in China left. Those first three weeks went extremely quickly, which I’ll admit, I was quite happy about. I’ve spent a lot of time away from the UK and from home this year and despite the fact that I was having the time of my life; I was also rapidly reaching my limit, and the idea of spending more than 5 days at home before rushing off somewhere else again was looking increasingly attractive.

Next Time – China part the last (part 5): Pandas, Poets and Planes

Vicky xx

China Part 3: Hostels and Hiking

When my trip to China was being planned, travelling in China was not on my to-do list. There were just too many practical issues. I wouldn’t have enough time; I wouldn’t have enough money, blah blah blah. I would just stay in Chengdu, where it wasn’t exactly like I would be bored, and one day in the long distant future when I’m not a poor student any more but (hopefully) a career money with some cash in the bank, I’d return to China and explore properly later.

But then I got to China, and I got jealous of everybody talking about all the travelling they’d been doing, and someone said, “Hey, let’s go to Beijing for a weekend!”

I thought about it.

For all of about two milliseconds.

Carpe Diem, as they say.

So ten days after I landed in China, I found myself back on a plane and Beijing bound. We managed to book tickets on the 07:30 Sichuan Airlines flight out of Chengdu and were in Beijing nice and early.

We stayed at Sanlitun Hostel, in the Chaoyang district, which we found on hostelworld.com. It was perfect for what we needed; not expensive, and it had a small restaurant/bar where we could grab breakfast or a drink in the evenings, and it was only 20 minutes or so away from Tiananmen Square and the like, which was where we headed first.

We started out in Tiananmen Square, which aside from being extremely large (it’s the largest public square in the world, and can hold over 1 million people) is perfectly unassuming, and it’s hard to relate the square as I saw it to the famous tank man picture taken during the infamous events of 1989.

It’s home to the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, the National Museum of China (or something like that, I forget exactly what it was called) and a large monument in the centre which Google tells me is the Monument to the People’s Heroes.

It’s also roughly where you go to get into the Forbidden City, which was the imperial palace for the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties. It was listed by UNESCO as a world heritage site in 1987, and you can see why. It is extremely impressive. The buildings are huge and ornate, and the gardens were beautiful. You can’t really go to Beijing and not visit.

That said, there are drawbacks to visiting. The Forbidden City is also the world’s largest palace complex (the Chinese like to be the biggest, apparently!).

Seriously. Once we got inside, it seemed to go on and on and on and on forever and ever and ever. I thought I was going to die there, old and grey, if I didn’t melt first. (Not really). There are so many courtyards, one after the other, and after a while, everything began to look the same and all we wanted to do was find the exit, which took a while. Also, even though it was a weekday, we are slap bang in the middle of peak season, and the crowds were pretty bad.

So – if you ever go, here’s my advice. Don’t go in the middle of summer, when it’s at its most boiling, and make sure you get an audio guide or something, so you actually know what you’re looking at (rookie mistake, I know, but there we have it).

We also had a bit of a weird food moment in the Forbidden City, when I was dared to buy a pea flavoured ice cream. I shouldn’t need to tell you that it was absolutely vile, and went in the bin pretty quickly. (Also, out of curiosity, I looked up #peaicecream instagram later on, and apparently if I had actually tried to eat the thing, I would have found actual peas on the inside. Gross)

Luckily, food for the rest of the weekend was perfectly fine. That night we went to Gui Jie and found a restaurant to have some proper Beijing Peking Duck, which (when it arrived – we were sat waiting for it for ages) was tres bien.

We essentially organised our Saturday around the tours that were advertised in the lobby of our hostel, so we started the day by heading about 70km northeast of Beijing on the coach, hopping on to a chair lift and up a very large mountain to see the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China.

I don’t know what was more impressive, really: the fact that this wall, crawling over mountains and through thick trees, was just so massive – it’s quite the commanding site – or the fact that something so massive and it was built by hand. On said mountains, through said thick trees, and from the middle of the 6^th century, no less.

Anyway, once we got to the top and took a few lots of photos, we decided to hike towards one of the many watch towers on this stretch of the wall, and the last part open in that direction before the dilapidated section, and then head back and do the other direction after that.

This proved to be a bit optimistic.

The mid 6^th century Chinese builders did not build the wall with 21^st century tourists in mind, and in places the stairs up to this watch tower were so steep that the staircase was essentially vertical. Rock climbing gloves would not have gone amiss (okay, I exaggerate, but seriously, climbing the wall took effort. When they say that you go hiking on the wall, they mean it, it’s no gentle stroll!). It also did not help that on the wall; the temperature was at least 40°C, with little to no cloud cover and little to no breeze.

Anyway, having sweated out at least half my body weight, we got to the top (yay!) where there was a little man selling bottles of water. He wanted ¥20 for one, which was a bit steep when we’d been paying about ¥3 in Beijing, so I didn’t buy one. Looking back, this was exceptionally stupid, given just how hot it was, and given that the man only wanted what was essentially £2, and this was probably one of the reasons why I ended up severely dehydrated by the end of the weekend, but perhaps I can blame said dehydration for my pig-headedness (Can’t I?)

Still, the wall was very impressive and offered some seriously brilliant views of the valleys around the bottom of the mountains, and we really couldn’t have gone to Beijing without going, could we?

Going back down to the bottom of the mountain, we took a slightly more interesting route than we had on the way up. We tobogganed down, which was quite fun (if slightly alarming on the sharper corners), and then went to a restaurant for our lunch, which was included in the amount we’d paid for the tour, and which turned out to be a lot bigger that I’d been expecting. We definitely got our money’s worth :)

When we got back to Beijing, we showered up and grabbed dinner at the hostel before heading a few minutes down the road for a show put on by the China National Acrobatic Troupe, which was also really good – there was a contortionist, and a juggler, some seriously cool stuff on a tightrope and loads of other stuff. You can see why the Chinese win so many medals in gymnastics, with the way this lot were jumping around. They must put so many hours of training in to do what they do – would you want to climb onto a tower of people balanced on a moving bike? I wouldn’t!

After the acrobatics show finished, we got back on the subway and went to Wanfujing’s snack street. It’s packed with food stalls which served some seriously strange street food – live scorpions on sticks, anyone? No? How about starfish? Still, it was actually really fun to meander around and look at the good and the stranger elements of Beijing, and we all did a bit of souvenir shopping.

Next morning, we decided to head back to Tiananmen Square and go to Mao’s Mausoleum, which is worth a visit if taking a few hours out of your day to see an embalmed communist leader is your thing. This was a simple enough plan, except that when we got to Qianmen station, we emerged into what can only be described as chaos. When we had been to Tiananmen Square on Friday, visiting hours at the Mausoleum were already over, and it was quite quiet. We wandered up to the Forbidden City with no problems.

Not so this time.

People were queuing up to get through security in droves. There were thousands and thousands of people, none of whom knew the definition of queuing, all of whom knew the definition of queue jumping, all of whom were happy to yell and scream and elbow the people next to them to get through quicker. Similar behaviour when we actually got into the square; similar behaviour when we actually got into the queue.

Then the realisation that we weren’t actually allowed to take any bags into the mausoleum. Helpfully, there were no signs anywhere to point this out, and the City Guide by TimeOut Beijing, which we’d been relying on, also very helpfully neglected to mention this. So (once we’d eventually established what the problem was and where I had to go to solve it) I had to dip out of the queue, head to the opposite side of the square to deposit our bags, and then wrestle through queues and security again to try and get back into the queue, which was exhausting. And then we spent an hour and a half queuing to get in (under relentless sunshine and with no water, seeing as we weren’t allowed our bags or anything really in the way of possessions, which just led to us feeling simply awful later).

It was actually this visit to the Mausoleum where I really saw for the first time that, for all its friendly façade and influx of capitalist brands, China is after all a communist country. When a big figure dies in the UK, or wherever, there’s obviously some public mourning – think Princess Diana, and the like – but it goes beyond that in China. It’s not just your average respect for the dead: there is a personality cult surrounding Chairman Mao (I mean, there’s a giant portrait of him adorning the entrance to the Forbidden City, which predates the communist regime by thousands and thousands and thousands of years!)

When we finally got close to the Mausoleum, people were buying yellow flowers, which, when we got inside, they laid in front of a giant statue of Mao, usually bowing at him several times. And then of course, there’s the fact that they embalmed him in the first place, for people to go and gawk at.

It’s an interesting phenomena, particularly when you take this in the context of a simple google search - the Cultural Revolution, or the famine caused by the 'Great Leap Forward', which killed 30 million Chinese peasants, or thereabouts, in between 1959 and 1962... I don't claim to be particularly knowledgeable about Mao, and I'm sure he did good things for China, but there is a reason he has his critics. 

It’s all very odd, and slightly uncomfortable.

Anyway, after this brief interlude (we were only actually in the mausoleum for about five minutes, after all that), we went and got our bags, and some lunch, and headed over to the Temple of Heaven, which is another complex of China’s ancient sacrificial buildings (the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest is the most famous part).

It’s also yet another UNESCO World Heritage site – China has 47 of these, second most in the world behind Italy, who has 50. I managed to visit a fair few of them in the short time I had.

By this point, though, I think the heat just got too much. It was extremely hot, we were sweating faster than we could replace the water, we’d done a lot of walking, and although we had time to do at least one more thing if we had wanted to, I think if we’d tried, one or all of us would have ended up with pretty severe dehydration and heatstroke. So we headed back to the hostel to freshen up and hang around in the air conditioning until it was time to head to the airport for our flight back to Chengdu.

Obviously, Beijing is a lot bigger than just the stuff that we saw. There was loads of stuff that we didn’t see, like the Summer Palace, the Ming Tombs and the famous Olympic Park, and that’s just the sights, not the real Beijing. But we just ran out of time, (and I suspect we wouldn’t have been able to summon the energy to do more in any case, it was just so hot).

Still, it was a really good weekend, and I’m so glad that I went and got to see a little bit more of China while I was there. It would have been silly to travel more than 5000 miles to somewhere I am extremely unlikely to be again very soon, and not make the most of it while I could.

I know this was another super long post, but you can’t go somewhere like China and not have a lot to say about it!

Next Time – China part 4: Tianfu, Tinder and Tea

Vicky xx

China Part 1: Food, Flights and Feeling Foreign

I promised I’d blog it, and here I am. I should mention is that it proved to be rather optimistic to fit a month’s worth of stuff into one post, or even two - I’ve split it all up (and this post is still going to be long and meandering, so I hope it’s readable). There’ll be several instalments before I wind this blog up for good at the end of the month.

So. As you might already know, I spent the last month in Chengdu, China (I got back yesterday). Chengdu is the capital city of the Sichuan province, in Western China, bordering Tibet. Originally, I was supposed to be going to Shanghai, and I was disappointed at first when it was changed to Chengdu. But as someone pointed out to me when I got there, Shanghai is, for all intents and purposes, a very western city, with lots of skyscrapers and western food. The reason a lot of people haven’t heard of Chengdu is because it’s a very liveable city, and not particularly touristy, like Beijing and the like, which means that I got to experience a lot more of real Chinese life and culture than I would if I had been to Shanghai instead. Now I’m back, I’m glad things ended up the way they did.

Who can resist a good 'I'm going travelling, look at me!' photo? Not me, apparently. 

Including the connection in Doha (I flew with Qatar Airways, who I’d recommend. They were actually very good, with lots of legroom and they served edible meals in strange abundance), it was roughly 15 hours to fly from Heathrow to Chengdu, and happily it was not at all stressful. I landed in China at about 3pm on the Tuesday afternoon. My first impressions are a bit vague… it was very humid outside (and continued to be for the rest of the month. But then, it is rainy season). Second – Chinese immigration officers are slightly frightening. Third - the toilet at the airport was just a hole in the floor, much to my dismay. And fourth - the clocks don’t change in China. So one of the first things that I noticed through my jet-lagged haze was that it got dark early. Pitch black, by 9pm, which was very weird for a while.

I got shown my apartment, in the Tongzilin area of Chengdu (where I found out that we were one of few apartments who actually had Wi-Fi. WIN!) By the time I’d been there for 6 hours or so, I’d bought a Chinese simcard (and phone, because idiot here didn’t bring the spare mobile I used in Paris with me), walked around being shown where the metro and the supermarket was (directions which I promptly forgot) nearly got run over and was given a travel card for the metro.

As a short aside, while I’m mentioning the metro - and driving, and transport generally - traffic regulations in China seem to be less 'laws' and more 'guidance'. It got pretty hairy at times, and you had to be very careful when you are crossing the road, even when there is a green man, because apparently the motorcyclists/moped people have apparently universally decided that red lights don't apply to them. Sometimes, I’m fairly sure that they’d happily travel the wrong way up the street. All the public transport is state operated: there is a metro in Chengdu, but it is very limited because it’s about as new as metros can get. There are only two lines operating so far, the youngest of which opened 2 years ago, and I think there are plans to build at least six more by 2020. To get in, though, you have to put your bags through a security scanner. It's like going to the airport every single time, which can get a bit tedious, if I'm honest. 

Anyway, back to business. After all of that, I suddenly realised that I was starving. So a few other volunteers and I went searching for somewhere to eat, and I had my first authentic Chinese meal. I’ve never felt more foreign in my entire life. At least in European countries the letters are familiar, but here, you couldn’t even make an educated guess. We pointed at a few pictures, looked blankly at the waitress who was trying vainly to help and hoped for the best (and luckily, everything turned out to be edible, so that was a win). We ended up with two types of noodles, some rice, two portions of what dumplings and some kind of soup, which you drank out of the bowl. I successfully wrestled my way around the meal with chopsticks (although the next few times I used them after that, I was a total fail, so chopsticks really were a bit hit and miss for me. I’m blaming my left handedness. Never mind the fact that thousands of Chinese people are probably left handed too), and then I discovered the delights of the ¥/£ exchange rate.

Our meal (for 5 people) came to ¥53, or roughly £5.30. A pound each. Seriously! The basic rule of thumb is that if you delete a zero from the Chinese sum, you have the equivalent in pounds. So ¥10 is £1.

And everything is cheeeeaaaaaap.

Later in the week, I took a journey on the Chengdu metro over 6 stops (roughly the distance of, say, Oxford Circus to Liverpool Street on the central line, and it cost me 34 PENCE.)  The day after that, a meal for 11 people cost £30 altogether. A 40 minute journey in a cab cost £4. I kid you not; China is an affordable place indeed - for westerners. I'm under no illusions about how different it is for someone on a Chinese salary and actually had some interesting discussions on the topic during my stay.

Anyway, after that, we went to the supermarket - Carrefour, funnily enough, but nothing like the French version. There’s a distinct lack of croissants for one thing, and the meat counter is very alarming for another. It’s all dumped – no wrapping – in a large fridge, open to the elements (and flies) and people will pick up bits of meat with their bare hands and poke and prod it for a while before deciding that actually, they don’t want it. It smelt terrible. (Needless to say, I didn’t frequent the meat counter). Also, you can buy live fish for food. They hook them out of their tanks in a net and then slam them to the ground to kill them. Charming, no? There were also turtles in similar tanks and I’m really hoping that they didn’t end up with the same fate as the fish!

Meanwhile, the yoghurt aisle had descended into something reminiscent of Romford Market, because there were a lot of people yelling about (presumably) yoghurt into microphones..

I forced myself to stay awake and be sociable that night in an effort to go to bed at a normal hour and make my body clock adjust, but I was super tired for a few days. (Someone told me that it takes a day to recover for every hour of time difference. I haven’t a clue if that’s true or not, but I’m taking that excuse and running with it). And after I did eventually go to sleep, I woke up the next morning stiff as a board. Chinese beds are hard. Like bricks. It didn’t even dip when I sat on it. Anyway, after unpacking and doing all of that kind of thing, I went to a barbecue put on by the Projects Abroad staff.

On the way there, we walked past a park, where there were loads of Chinese people playing with what looked like a large metal spinning top, and to keep it spinning they hit it with a large metal thing - it looked (and sounded!) a little bit like a whip. And there were also loads of Chinese people just dancing - like properly dancing, the waltz or some such thing - around the square to music. It was quite surreal actually. At the BBQ itself I met some of the staff and some other volunteers, and had a go at making my own dumplings (which I was terrible at), and the next day I was shown how to get to my placement (which as I mentioned, I’ll be posting about separately, for purposes of not making this blog post an epic novel).

At the weekend, I had to attend a 'cultural class' - basically a crash course in not mortally offending Chinese manners while I was there and some basic mandarin so I wasn’t completely helpless in every single situation! Unfortunately, I forgot most of it almost immediately – it was very intense. I think the problem was that the teacher tried to feed us way too much information in an hour and a half, so I didn’t have time to commit anything to memory before we moved on.

What else? (I am aware that I’m rambling but you try putting a months worth of happenings into a blog post worth reading!) We decided to have a bit of a gathering in our flat that night, and went to Carrefour to pick up a few things (including Cucumber flavoured crisps, which for the record, are vile) and saw some Tibetan monks casually doing their grocery shopping. Obviously normal – Tibetan monks need food as much as anyone else, but for some reason this struck me as seriously odd. Culture shock, I suppose. In a pleasant contrast to Paris, and home for that matter, everything opens late on the weekends here - properly late. We're talking 23:00 for Carrefour, even on Sundays (I guess, because it's an officially atheist country, although I could be wrong about that.)

Also that weekend, Noemie from my apartment was invited by a colleague to a barbecue. She took us all along, and it was an experience in and of itself.

Now, in the street, it has to be said that some Chinese people can be appallingly rude. Although you could say that of many other nationalities too. And I suppose in all fairness it should be pointed out that there is an exponential culture difference, which apparently extends to what behaviour is appropriate in public (hint: it would be completely frowned upon here). People spit - a lot - they shove, shout and pint, and for young children, everywhere is a public toilet. Seriously - their children do not wear nappies, and they have conveniently placed holes in their trousers so they can go wherever and whenever they please.  Usually on the street - sometimes you'll catch a parent holding their child over a rubbish bin instead, which is marginally better I suppose. Still, I question how they are ever potty trained.

Having said all that, at home, things are different. Their hospitality is second to none (that I've ever experienced, anyway). They mentioned it in our culture talk, but here, I saw the proof. People they invite into their homes are honoured guests. During this barbecue, we offered to help but she wouldn't hear of it, we were constantly plied with food and drink, she spotted my mozzy bites (of which, sadly, there were many) and went dashing off looking for something to put on them, and then when we left, she apologised for not looking after us properly! Anyway, we had a lovely time, played a million rounds of some game that I vaguely remember playing in Drama class at Crofton, and I tried some more authentic Chinese food.

One dish, which I did not try, was chicken feet. It turned up, and although I already knew that the Chinese weren't picky about what part of an animal they eat, I was still a bit like, Oh my god. That is literally feet. Battered feet in a bowl. I'm sure it tastes fine, or they wouldn't eat it. But I just could not bring myself to put a chicken foot in my mouth. Sorry.

Once we made our excuses and left, Noemie and I headed into the main part of Chengdu to have a look around. We started in Tianfu Square, which is a large public square overlooked by a giant statue of Chairman Mao. He has his hand in the air, supposedly waving to the people, but one of the Projects Abroad staff told me that it's a local joke that he's actually just trying to get a taxi and is having no luck haha. 

Give up, Mao! You're not going to get a cab!

Then we walked to People's Park, which is one of the most insane, crazy places I have ever been. How can I explain this? I've never seen anything like it before, and nothing I can say will really give you a decent picture of how nutty this place was, but I’ll give it a shot.

Every pathway, nook and cranny had been filled with makeshift tents, of a sort, erected very close to each other along the pathways, and in each tent people were gambling, dancing, being terrible at karaoke or singing (marginally better than the karaoke crew) and putting on performances for small crowds of people. People would go up to these singers on the stage and give them flowers, presumably plastic ones, which were conveniently placed in buckets at each corner closest to the audience. And because these tents were so close together you only had to walk about a metre in one direction or the other before the tune would change completely… Honestly, it's not something you can really make clear in words alone!

I’m not even really sure that you can tell what it’s like from that montage that I made from the videos on my phone, although on the first clip, you can clearly hear the guy who is singing in the second clip, and in the clip at the end, where people are dancing, you can definitely hear the opera woman who preceded it. Essentially, it’s big, it’s loud, it’s uniquely Chinese and it’s completely and utterly insane.

There are also several teahouses in the park (I'm really not a big fan of Chinese tea but I did have a proper Chinese tea experience before I left) and a really cute boating lake, which my brother said looks a bit like Central Park, and (here is where I show how culturally ignorant I am) loads of classically Chinese... Structures? Shelters? I don't know.  

And also, much to my bemusement, we ended up being a bit of a tourist attraction ourselves. I’ve already mentioned that Chengdu isn’t very touristy, and you don’t really see many westerners around. I was always getting stared at on the metro, and we got stopped several times in the park so that people could take photos of (or with) us.  Which is a bit strange but quite funny, really.

That pretty much sums up my first week in China. It’s a bit rambly, but actually, China is a bit rambly, so maybe that makes sense.

Next time – China part 2: Internships and Intestines

Vicky xx

Les oeuvres de Monet

I don't know if I have mentioned this on my blog in the past, but one place I've been wanting to visit since before I even arrived here is Giverny, or home to the famous French impressionist, Claude Monet. I planned to go and do just that on the Monday just gone, when I realised with a sinking feeling that the cost of my train ticket there and the entrance fee to the gardens themselves actually equated to all the money I have left for this month, and tempting though it was (and it was very tempting. I almost went anyway), sensibleness won out. After all, I didn't think it was really very smart to leave myself with only €0.30 in copper coins for the remaining five days of my time here.

So that's another casualty on my bucket list, and the one I am most sad about, without question. I was really looking forward to going and I'm super disappointed that it didn't happen. But these things happen, and I know my mum was jealous that I was going, so maybe she'll come with me to do it one day in the future.

Still, I am an appreciator of Monet and impressionist works, and as it happens, a lot of Monet's most famous works live in various museums right here in Paris. I went and looked at them last week, on my first free day after exams (the only reason I didn't blog it earlier was because I had been planning to do a joint paintings/Giverny post, but as I said, it was not to be). 

I started off at the Musée Marmottan Monet, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.

It's home to the largest collection of Monet works in the world as well as paintings by lots of other famous masters, including Manet, David, Gérard and Cézanne.

After that I took the metro over to Concorde, spent a while soaking up some rays in the Tuilieries and then went into the Musée de l'Orangerie which is home to Monet's Water Lilies. You're not technically supposed to take photos, but of course people have and a quick google images search will show you the impressive paintings (of which I think I counted eight, and they're all huge). In fact, one of his paintings from the water lilies series has just sold at Sotheby's in London for £31.7m.

Anway, the paintings were all very interesting to look at and hear more about. It's not quite Giverny, but it will do for now.

Vicky xx