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

Une liste: la partie finale!

Fin. Finished. End. Caput. No more. 

My time in Paris is at an end! Ten months down the line, my year abroad is drawing to a close (but is not ended just yet, for reasons I shall mention at the end of this post...). I packed up my bags and left my lovely apartment for the last time on Saturday just gone, and now I am temporarily (again, see end of this post) back in Blighty and getting all reminiscent. I tried to do a 'Paris in numbers' post, but it would have been boring, because I couldn't put an actual number on most of the things I came up with, and it would have gone something like this: "Many, many crêpes, Many more croissants, Even more carnets for the Metro..."

Which is boring. 

Instead, I've finally been through and updated my 'Paris things to do/bucket list', crossing off everything I managed to get done in my final few weeks in the French capital. 

Voilà.

1. Visit the Versailles Palace

2. Go to Notre Dame Cathedral

3. Visit Les Catacombs

4. Indulge in la cuisine, including croissants, macaroons, snails, frogs legs, seafood, and everything else French and/or Parisian. (On the seafood side of things, La Bar a Huitres is the place that I went for my birthday, and it really was delicious. There's several of them in Paris - I went to the one in Montparnasse. They've got a menu that ranges from massive seafood platters costing a few hundreds of euros, to a nice fixed menu for 44 euros, which was much better for my poor student budget)

5. Go to see the Pantheon

6. Spend time in La Jardin du Luxembourg

The next three I didn't do, and I always knew I wouldn't actually be able to do them this year - the first and second because I'm elsewhere at the time they happen; the third because I spent it at home. But I'm keeping them on my list because they're three things which really ought to be done in Paris, and though I won't be doing them this year, I'll be making sure to do them at some point!

7. View the Bastille Day Parade

8. Finale of the Tour de France

9. Spend NYE in Paris

10. Go to the Louvre and see the Mona Lisa! I have well and truly done the Louvre. I think I went there at least six times, covering pretty much every wing they've got in that place, and it's massive. To people going to the Louvre - see the Mona Lisa if you want, although she's pretty underwhelming, but make sure to do Napoleon's apartments too, in the Richelieu wing.

11. Go to Disneyland Paris. Disclaimer: I've actually been here before, so I count it as done. I wasn't going to include it on my list at all, but my "little" (he's 16) brother insisted that I include it, which was blatantly a not very subtle hint that I should take him.

12. Go to Sacré Coeur.

13. Stroll down the Champs-Élysées, and end up in the Place de la Concord

14. Rue Mouffetard - home of my favourite place to get a crêpe, Au P'tit Grec.

15. Go to the Palais Garnier

16. Visit Monet's garden at Giverny - I tried to do this, but on the metro heading to the train station realised that I would leave myself properly, PROPERLY skint if I went, which didn't seem wise.

17. Go to the top of the Eiffel Tower AND go see the Eiffel Tower at night

18. Visit at least 3 other European Countries. I did manage to visit Berlin in Germany, and I was intending to go to Brussels, but I just couldn't afford it, so sadly, this didn't going to happen.

19. Go to the Christmas Market in Strasbourg

20. Spend the day at Parc Asterix :) - another one for which I ran out of time and money!

21. Go to Bercy Shopping Village - because, really, what's Paris without some retail therapy?

22. Les Invalides

23. Moulin Rouge - It costs a fortune to actually see a show, but I've seen the outside and that will do for now!

24. Spend a few days on the South Coast and maybe in Monaco - this was another one that ended up being unrealistic.

25. La Marais and Place des Vosges

26. La Conciergerie

27. Visit St- Sulpice

28. Go to the roof at Galleries Lafayette - incidentally, I really loved the interior of this store. It's gorgeous!

29. Go the Musée de l'Orangerie

30. Go over to the Arc de Triomphe

31. Visit some other French Towns. I've been to Strasbourg (see no. 19 on the list) and also to Dijon.

32. Go for a walk along the Canal St Martin

33. Bois du Boulogne

34. See some jazz of some kind while I'm here!

35. Visit Le Château de Fontainebleau

36. Go to Musee d'Orsay

37. See an exhibition at the Grand Palais - Parisa and I went to see the Cartier exhibition back in January.

38. Go to Musee Marmottan.

39. Go to the French Open

40. Take a photo of Kilometre Zero, which is right outside Notre Dame (Km Zero is the point to which distances are measured to in Paris)

41. Find the most famous graves at Père Lachaise cemetery. (In case you're wondering, Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde are just two of several famous names buried there)

42. Parc des Buttes Chaumont

43. Visit La Sainte-Chapelle

44. Browse the shelves at the bookshop, Shakespeare and Co

30 out of 44 things done. Not bad, even if I do say so myself. I'll be adding everything I didn't do to my mainstream bucket list, which I keep in the back of my journal. I'll cross everything off of it at some point, be it next year or in the next ten!

The next part of my year abroad is completely un-Erasmus related and it is all down to a company called Projects Abroad - http://www.projects-abroad.co.uk/ - who offer lots of volunteering projects in countries all over the world. I remembered them all the way back from the Gap Year fair at my Sixth Form College, and now I'm finally off on my Project, having got here rather in a rather convoluted fashion.

I'm going to be working for a month in a law firm in Chengdu, China, which is super exciting, and I'm jetting off again in about a week - so watch this space!

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

Un weekend des châteaux: #1 - Le Palais de Versailles

On Saturday, I finally made it to Versailles, with a week to spare!

Well, it sounds like I was cutting it close, but I've honestly been 'saving up' Versailles if you like, mainly because I thought that it would be better to go and see it in the summer when its beautiful gardens should be at their best, but also because I realised, upon doing some idle googling one day, that the light show happens on Saturdays, starting from yesterday, and yesterday being my very last Saturday in Paris, (I know! *sob*), it was the only day that I could do it.

Me and my friend Anne-Marie headed over to the RER station at Musée d'Orsay earlyish on Saturday morning - but if you're going there, note that you can get there on the same ticket and a lot lot quicker if you get the train from Montparnasse to Versailles-Chantier, which we realised on the way back. The walk from the station to the château is a bit longer but it's worth it.

The Versailles website suggests that on the busiest days you start off on the Gardens and make your way into the Château itself later in the day to avoid the worst of the people traffic, and so that's what we did. 

The gardens themselves are very beautiful, and I think that holding off on a visit until summer paid off very nicely. The flowers were in bloom, the fountains were running, and people were out boating on the Grand Canal, and it gave me a very nice holiday feeling, thankyou very much, as opposed to feeling like I was on 'just' a day trip.

It was also sweltering hot - there was not a cloud in the sky until well after 19:00 and all in all I really think the gardens were at their best. 

A (rather pricey) chocolate ice cream later, and we walked leisurely up the Grand Canal towards the Grand and Petit Trianons, and Marie-Antoinette's hamlet. 

This is where you start to understand why the citizens of France started to get a bit disgruntled with their esteemed Royal Family and start a wee revolt. The Grand Trianon was apparently built so that the King could have a little privacy with which to conduct a love affair. 

An excellent use of the peoples taxes, no?

Anyway, the gardens of the Grand Trianon, again, were what struck me the most, and me and Anne-Marie spent ages taking pictures of them.

Marie-Antoinette's hamlet was something else that made me laugh. Of course the woman who supposedly declared, "let them eat cake!" would play pretend and be 'normal' by ordering an entire mini village to be built in her back garden!

It was very lovely though. I could have spent a couple of hours there alone, meandering around and enjoying the sunshine.

After this, we were getting quite hungry, so we stopped off at a restaurant, whose name currently escapes me, for something to eat. Considering we were sitting in the middle of one of the biggest tourist-traps in the whole of Île de France and beyond, the prices were fairly reasonable - €11 or so for a pizza, €8 for a ham omelette with a salad and bread. The ony thing that was noticeably extortionate was the coke. A medium sized one cost Anne-Marie something on the region of €5.60!

Anyway, hunger satisfied we made our way into the château itself. Truly, you can see why Versailles earned the reputation it did. It is dripping in splendor, nearly everything covered in marble and gold leaf and so on. 

Most famous of all, and for good reason, is the Hall of Mirrors, a long gallery adorned with several mirrors (duh), chandeliers and large windows which make the room bright as anything and very very beautiful. 

If I had one complaint to make about the château, it would be this.

Overcrowding.

The amount of people filtering through the Grands Appartements was, at times, slightly alarming. There were people every which way, the temperature in the room was climbing steadily, there wasn't much in the way of seating for those - I'm thinking here of the elderly and not the lazy - who needed it, and at times it was hard to see any of the room in which we were standing for the throng of bodies. It made it quite hard to appreciate what we were seeing. And this was late in the day when there was supposedly 'less' people traffic.

They need to, in my opinion, introduce a system rather like that which they have running at Buckingham Palace in London, where you pay for a ticket which can only be used within a  certain timeframe, thus staggering out the number of visitors. I understand the need to make money from opening the palace up to the public, I do, but Versailles obviously makes so money in a year that I really wouldn't be all that concerned if I limited the number of people who could go through at once. The gardens are more than big enough and nice enough to keep people entertained in the meantime. 

Anyway, my whinging over and done with, I can carry on to the Royal Serenade, which we also paid to see (largely, I admit, to fill the gap in between the closure of the château and it's gardens and the light show in the evening).

Basically, it consisted of a company of actors in period dress, putting on three mini performances throughout the grand apartments.

First, an opera singer and period instrumentalist - I'm completely ignorant about these things, but if I had to guess, I would say it was a lute or something similar.

Second - and my favourite segment, was a display, set to music, of the rituel d'habillage, or the ritual in which courtiers of the day would dress their King and Queen.

And last, a man playing some kind of instrument that reminded me a lot of bagpipes, but which was actually something else.

Anyway, after this an hour wait in the sunshine saw the gardens being reopened for the evening show. Wandering around the gardens, all of the fountains had been turned on. Some were playing to music, some had strobe lights and dry ice, and some put on seven minute 'displays' which were pretty awesome to watch.

The sunset was spectacular, and right before the sun dipped totally below the horizon, the sky was a bright crimson, which reflected in the Grand Canal made a real sight to behold.

And then, the pinnacle of the night - the fireworks. This was what we'd all been waiting for, really, and it didn't disappoint. I would add pictures, but my phone had died by this point and they're all on my camera (and I currently have no laptop to transfer them to, as I sent it back to the UK with my dad for some much needed repairs).

All told, it was a very nice, if very exhausting day, and I'm glad I managed to cross it off my bucket list. It wasn't the only château I went to this weekend - I visited Fontainebleau on Sunday, but I'll post about that separately. 

Speaking of, today is Monday and I leave this week (!!!!!) so I only have 4 more full days to explore. 

Time flies -

Vicky xx