BRITISH COUNCIL’S STUDY CHINA Woah… I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to finally type up what I think about Study China and let you know what this programme is all about. If you haven’t seen them already, there is a vlog series on my YouTube channel where you can see everything I got up […]
Inner Mongolia: Hulun Buir & Heishantou | Travel Diaries
INNER MONGOLIA Boy, oh boy, where do I even begin with our four-day trip to Inner Mongolia’s Hulun Buir grasslands? I thought I’d start off by posting two personal posts detailing what we got up to, in the style of a Travel Diary, and then I’ll type up an Inner Mongolia Travel Guide. Here goes… […]
Picture Perfect: Inner Mongolia | Travel Diaries
INNER MONGOLIA Inner Mongolia isn’t the very first place you’d think of visiting. I’m still not quite sure how I ended up going for four days this summer, but I understood exactly why as soon as we got there. These pictures will give you a taste of my trip and the posts to come… (and […]
Shanghai in Pictures | Travel Diaries
I’ve finally got round to importing and editing a collection of photos from my latest trip to Shanghai. We spent five days being tourists and exploring the bubbling metropolitan city. We wandered around markets and street stalls filled with small restaurants and shops selling small trinkets. There were also parks, temples and gardens: We had […]
My flight: London to Shanghai
The last time I was on a plane which was more than a couple of hours was my flight back from Beijing last June. I spent most of the flight sleeping and resenting the fact that I was flying back home after a seven-month trip. I really, really didn’t want to get off that plane […]
Learning Mandarin intensively | My Experience
I am currently six weeks through university and the majority of what I have been doing is learning Latin intensively. I have one hour every single day at 9am sharp (apart from Thursdays, thank god for Thursdays!) with a class of about ten others. Studying Latin intensively makes me reflect on my time studying Mandarin intensively. […]
11 Must-Knows Before Going to China
1. EVERYTHING IS BLOCKED IN CHINA If you’ve been living under a rock, or if you’ve never really given China much thought (which is entirely fair enough) then you may not know that pretty much everything is blocked in China. Facebook? Instagram? Snapchat? Twitter? YouTube? BBC? Google? Gmail? Yeah… those don’t exist in China. Want to keep in […]
The Volunteer Series: Daily Life
Since writing a detailed post on my volunteering experience in China, I’ve had a few questions from friends about what day-to-day life was actually like. Life as a volunteer was the complete opposite to life as a backpacker and this was something Alice and I both had to adjust to quickly. Furthermore, life in China in general is completely […]
The Volunteer Series: My Experience
Deciding to volunteer in China as part of my gap year was relatively simple: I knew I wanted to come back to China for a length of time (since I’m originally from China) and I wanted to volunteer as a teacher for the experience. Not only is teaching a potential career for me in the […]
The Volunteer Series: TEFL in Photos | Chengdu
For the past two months I’ve been volunteering as an English teacher in Chengdu, China. I taught sixteen classes a week: 10 junior (year 8) and 6 senior (year 11). As part of my volunteer series, I’ve put together a post of my past two months in photos. Included are: some bits of my two-day […]