Danny's Holiday

Now for my first entry based on the little white silhouette in the corner of this page- my dog Danny. Dan is a nearly-ten-year-old Shetland Sheepdog and has been my pride and joy since I was eleven. He has qualified for Crufts many times and has even taken me to the Young Kennel Club's agility finals in the NEC Arena.

Sadly in recent years he has suffered quite a few health problems such as arthritis, diabetes and a nasty malignant tumour, but still he has a very sweet nature (albeit slightly timid) and is, in my eyes, a very special boy.

During my first two years of university and most of this year (unsurprisingly he couldn't join me in China) I have had to leave Dan in the care of my parents and although he is happy at home, I do miss him a lot. Fortunately the house in which I am currently staying with my friends doesn't seem to have a clause in the contract forbidding pets so when my parents went on holiday last week we decided to see how Dan would cope at being a student dog.

I was slightly worried about having Danny come to stay, especially as a male dog with a previous for cocking his leg against people's sofas, but I am pleased to say he has coped admirably, so much so that even after my parents' return he has stayed in Birmingham to keep me company. My housemates seem to enjoy having him around the house and, after a lot of bribery involving prawns and cheese, Danny is slowly making friends with them too.

The biggest test came on Wednesday night when we had a large number of people round in the evening and I was slightly anxious that Danny would be reduced to a nervous wreck. However I needn't have worried- I left him up in my bedroom with a bowl of water and after a short while came to check on him to find him asleep on the floor, cool as a cucumber.

The best thing about having Dan here in Birmingham is that having a more active lifestyle seems to have taken years off him. He appears to really enjoy being in a more busy environment and has been much brighter here than he does at home, where he tends to become a bit lethargic after a while. He even came with us to the letting agents when we had to sign the contract for our new house- not something that many dogs can claim to have done.

Now that I know Danny can handle the student lifestyle I have my fingers crossed that our landlord next year will allow him- here's hoping! I am so proud of my little boy.

Stray memories #1- the jianbing

One of my housemates asked me yesterday, 'so Becca, what exactly do you do with your days at the moment?' Unfortunately my answer would have to be 'embarrassingly little'. A proper update will come when I have enough material to amuse you with, but until then I shall write some more about my favourite topic: life in Beijing.

I have decided to do a series of entries about the little things that filled in the gaps between the more impressive-sounding stuff whilst I was in China; the features of everyday life that, for me, have become much fonder memories than visiting a famous historical site ever could be.

The first of these is the jianbing. A favourite amongst Beijingers as an on-the-go breakfast food (although I don't think I could bring myself to eat quite so much stodge before noon), jianbings are usually sold by street vendors manning little carts at the very reasonable price of 3 kuai or about 30p. The name literally translates as 'shallow fried round foodstuff' which doesn't give many clues as to its contents: essentially the jianbing is a large pancake with an egg spread over it onto which are sprinkled some coriander and spring onions; a dash of spicy sauce is added and lastly a square of fried crispy pastry is put on top before the whole thing is folded up and popped into a plastic sandwich bag.

My first experience of the snack came about rather by accident- I went out one evening in search of some chocolate fish (another tasty street food) but found that the man selling them wasn't in his usual place. Instead was a lady selling from a little cart with a gaggle of Chinese students standing around it. Without any idea of what she was selling, I tentatively went up to her and asked for one. She asked me whether I wanted every ingredient put into my mystery dish, to which I nervously smiled and nodded, and a few seconds later I was handed a steaming bag of unknown food. Unfortunately upon further inspection I realised that my purchase had a large amount of coriander in it, one of those things which I'm just really not keen on, but my enthusiasm for jianbings (I later found the name of it on someone else's blog) remained.

After telling my Chinese friend Christina about my new discovery, she instructed me on how to ask for no coriander and so a few days later I made jianbing attempt number two. This time I snaffled the whole thing up in record time and it was so tasty that I did for a while consider going back and getting another. From then on I became an avid (some would say unhealthily so) fan of the food and since my arrival back in England have been craving it immensely.

Jianbings are best eaten when cold, hungry or short on cash- if you ever find yourself a little peckish whilst wandering the streets of Beijing then I can think of no better thing to buy! Zaijian!

One week in the Midlands (of China)

Not long after our friendship group (nicknamed 'The Lads'- I was the only female member) had started to take shape, we decided that it would be fun to venture out on a bit of travelling before we all left for our respective home countries. We initially looked into going down to the southern provinces of Yunnan and Hainan but after chasing round a number of Beijing hospitals trying to find malaria tablets with very little success, it was decided that we should visit somewhere we would find interesting yet which didn't face us with the possibility of catching a deadly disease. Eventually we decided to take the following route:

Chengdu

After a three-hour flight, during which we were presented with some of what I imagine would be a strong contender for the title of Worst Airline Food Ever, we touched down in the green, leafy city of Chengdu, the largest settlement in Sichuan province. I was immediately struck by how much more habitable it seemed than Beijing: the skyline was lower, the roads weren't quite as tightly rammed with cars and the air felt far more humid than the biting winds of the capital. Sim's Cozy Garden Hostel, which was to be our home for the next four nights, was nicely done out and had a great cheap-and-cheerful atmosphere. Luckily the seven of us had a room to ourselves and the first night consisted of staying up chatting and giggling like ten-year-olds at a sleepover until we finally succumbed to our tiredness at 4 in the morning.


On our first morning in Chengdu we took a bus to the Tibetan quarter of town and, although fascinated by the glimpse it provided of a different way of life, we were saddended to be presented with the terrible poverty that surrounded us on the streets. The mood was lifted as we had lunch in a traditional Tibetan restaurant and stuffed ourselves with delicious meaty baozi and a new favourite of mine, yak pie.

Chengdu is home to a large panda breeding centre and so on the second morning we went and had a look. Pandas generally wake early, stuff themselves with bamboo and then sleep for the rest of the day, saving their energy for the rare occasion when they decide to mate (or 'copulate' as the centre eloquently put it) and so at 8am we were already standing poised beside their enclosures with our cameras at the ready . They didn't disappoint- we stood there for hours, mesmerised by these adorable vegetarian bears which lay on their backs crunching through sticks of bamboo. We were then shown a video which told us in detail of the complicated process which goes into getting pandas to procreate and of how, at six weeks old, the panda cubs leave their mother to go and socialise with their 'contemporaries'. We also stumbled across a photo of John Prescott cuddling a baby panda on a visit to the centre which tickled the Brits among us.

Whilst staying in Chengdu we also went for Sichuan hotpot (sounds fun in theory, in reality it was a bit of a faff), drove a long way out of the city to visit a giant Buddha carved into a cliff at Leshan and taught the young son of a restaurant owner how to high-five and give a thumbs-up.

All in all, Chengdu was a lovely place to stay and a refreshing change from dry, mucky Beijing. Perhaps we were all a little too optimistic when we boarded the two-hour train to..

Chongqing

I do not wish to give Chongqing a bad name, but my experience of the place was not pleasant. Even though the grey skies and temperatures on the wrong side of zero didn't do the city much justice, I think that even on a good day it wouldn't be the most aesthetically pleasing of places. We took a hilly bus ride from the station to Ciqikou, the traditional market area in which the hostel was located, and wandered around for what felt like ages trying to find our home for the night. Perfect Time Hostel unfortunately didn't quite live up to its name- it wasn't expensive at £2.90 a night but for that much I still would have appreciated the back door to have been closed instead of allowing a freezing draught to work its way into our unheated bedrooms. We whiled away the evening in the (also chilly) bar, drinking Tsingtao beer, playing pool and murdering various pop hits on the hostel's karaoke machine. I then spent an incredibly uncomfortable night curled up tightly underneath a thin duvet and waking up periodically to nurse my icy feet, and when the morning finally came I wasn't sad at all to be able to wave goodbye to the place as we left for the airport.

Our main reason for staying in Chongqing was that the flights out of there were a lot cheaper than from Chengdu, but there must have been some kind of error with the travel agent we booked with because after rushing to get to the airport for what we thought was an early morning flight, checking in our baggage and passing through security, we looked at our tickets and realised that we had turned up nine hours early for boarding. However what could have been an incredibly boring day with us getting on each other's nerves actually turned out to be quite good fun, with the help of a pack of playing cards and comfy sofas provided by Starbucks.

Nanjing

Our arrival in Nanjing was, for me, somewhat tinged with sadness, as for Dan and I it would be the final leg of our journey and the place where we would have to say goodbye to our friends, not knowing when we would see many of them again. Our base for the three nights we would spend there, the Jasmine Hostel, wasn't too bad, even though Clare and I discovered with horror that we had a heavily snoring roommate who had a habit of leaving orange peel all over the floor.

On the first day we made the unanimous decision to visit the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, a large area devoted to the large number of Nanjingers who lost their lives to the Japanese in 1937. We ended up staying there for nearly five hours which, although interesting, was incredibly intense and by the end we all felt a bit overwhelmed by the melancholy atmosphere and the vast amounts of historical information which were presented to us.

On our second day in Nanjing and our last full day together we took a bus out of town and climbed a mountain that would have been quite pleasant had there been less litter lying about, then took a little road train to Sun Yat-Sen's mausoleum (I don't quite know the details of why he was so important but I was told he was the founder of modern China). Despite the cold winds there were Chinese tourists in abundance and Clare and I were hounded for quite a while by a group of women seemingly desperate to have their photo taken with two white girls.

That night we went out to a nice duck restaurant near the hostel and sat around making toasts and laughing about the fun times we'd had together. We ambled back to the hostel's bar where the chatting and joking continued, with Dan and I drinking celebratory shots of baijiu forced upon us by the others. We then had a surprise as Jack and Alex had made up songs for each of us which, although hilarious in parts, left me with tears streaming down my face by the end. Thinking back to that night still leaves me feeling sad as I remember how none of us really wanted to go to bed because that would signal the end of our journey together.

Unfortunately this story doesn't have a very pleasant ending- Dan and I were rudely awoken at 4am in order to catch our flight back to Beijing and we parted with sleepy, tearful goodbyes in the freezing cold. We arrived back to a very empty-feeling Building 17 but made the best of the next couple of days with trips to the Forbidden City and down to our local on the last night.

And that brings me up to the start of my previous blog entry.. if you've read through all of this then congratulations! Zaijian!

Rounding off a square peg

At 7:25 am last Tuesday morning, after an unsuccessful attempt at a night's sleep inside Beijing Capital Airport, I boarded the plane that would take me away from the new life I had been living in China and plant me back into the my old one in the UK (via Dubai). As I watched the city disappear beneath me I struggled to balance feelings of regret and sadness at leaving behind my friends and my Beijing life but also immense excitement at what awaited me in Birmingham- I had told my boyfriend that I would be back in February but planned to come back three weeks early as a birthday surprise for him. Despite a couple of instances which could have proved disastrous and ruined my plans, including my entry on the guestlist of a ball I wasn't supposed to be able to come to and drunken Skype calls which I later analysed scrupulously to make sure I hadn't slipped up and told him, the surprise went perfectly and his reaction as I nonchalantly strolled through the door of the kitchen was absolutely fantastic.

I hadn't envisaged that I would experience reverse culture shock and rather expected my first trip back into the centre of Birmingham to be accompanied by a rush of excitement and a wave of immense happiness similar to greeting an old friend; instead it was grey, drab and a bit of a disappointment. I wandered around aimlessly whilst reeling at the extortionate prices of things in comparison to those in China and, deciding to try and bring back a bit of my Beijing life, bought two large packs of frozen dumplings from a Chinese supermarket. I realised that I was in a similar position to when I was away and trying to seek out things that reminded me of my life back home- now I was doing the opposite and looking for things which I had back in China in order to cling on to the memories of the good times I had out there.

That said, being reunited with my family and friends has been nothing short of amazing and my slight feeling of being a bit disconnected doesn't at all mean that I was disappointed to see them. On Friday night I was treated to a second Christmas dinner with my family, complete with crackers, a tree and Shakin' Stevens- a little more traditional than my Beijing Christmas but highly enjoyable nonetheless.

One amusing result of having spent nearly five months in another country where few people speak English has been the loss of my inhibitions about saying anything I want due to people not being able to understand me. I think I embarrassed my brother the other day when we were standing in a queue at the Co-op whilst waiting for a train and I was loudly whispering 'come on, come on, stop faffing about!' before realising that everyone was probably thinking to themselves what an impatient so-and-so I was.

I have yet to update this blog on the adventures we had during our week of travelling before I left China but I think that belongs in another post to stop this one from becoming too long. Zaijian everyone!

Confliction

I have never felt so torn in my life. In the same way that it felt surreal to think that I was going to Beijing in the weeks leading up to my departure date, it is now hard to properly take in the fact that the time I have left here is so limited. I had to drop everything and completely put my life on hold to come here and in doing so I feel as if I have entered a bubble on the other side of the world- a microcosm of the real world where I had to start afresh and create a new life out of nothing. But what a fantastic life mine has been here: I have seen amazing sights, eaten a wide range of weird foodstuffs and have had experiences which I could never have dreamt of before coming to China. However the memories which I think I will treasure the most are those of the times I have shared with the people I have met here- whether good or bad, drunken or studious. I have had the privilege of getting to know such a vast range of characters from all around the world, people who have managed to put a smile on my face every day, that I now feel as if my heart is caught between here and home and I imagine it will take a fair amount of time before this feeling goes away.

Hao hao hao!

If I'm perfectly honest, I was a bit worried that Christmas in Beijing would be something of a non-event: a day spent trying my best to put on a brave face and to not become too wistful about family gatherings going on back at home. Not so! Celebrating the festive period here has been a brilliant experience and whilst spending it half the world away from my family is not something I'd like to make a regular thing of, this has without doubt been one of the best Christmases I have ever had.

It was a lucky coincidence that Christmas day fell on a Saturday this year- had it been on a weekday, we would've been in lessons doing revision for our fast approaching end-of-term exams. Christmas eve's lessons were spent playing games and exchanging white elephant presents with our classmates, which ranged from the attractively decorated bottle opener I received (my teacher let out a squeal of amusement when I opened it, exclaiming that it was a really fitting present for me) to a packet of chicken's feet which luckily no-one had the misfortune of having to open. The day was made even more amusing by the fact that three of my best friends had decided to dress up as Father Christmas (or 'the Christmas old man' in Chinese') for the day, which garnered them a huge amount of attention, particularly from gaggles of female Chinese students who seemed to delight in the opportunity to have their photo taken with three Western Santas.

We also had a get-together in our halls the night before to do a bit of carol singing which was fantastic and got us all into the rowdy Christmas spirit, but unfortunately the maintenance staff didn't quite have the same appreciation for our singing and on more than one occasion we were shushed and told to move on. Looking back I can't really blame them though as I don't think any of us exactly has the voice of an angel and we were being very loud.

Just before Christmas, my friends Dan and Tom told me they were going to seek out the only microbrewery in Beijing and, being an avid beer drinker in the mood for a bit of adventure, I tagged along with them. As the brewery was situated a fair walk from the nearest subway station and with temperatures of around -8°c outside we decided that we would be daring and take a ride in a slightly dodgy-looking motorised rickshaw. These tiny vehicles are basically a motor-trike with an aluminium cover over the back and I very much doubted their stability over the bumpy hutong roadways with three people squashed into the back seat, but our driver seemed dead set on proving me wrong, turning corners at break-neck speed and zooming across potholes in the road with seemingly no regard in the slightest for the safety limits of his little cab. By the end of the ride my nerves were thoroughly in tatters and I had a newfound appreciation for the steadiness of the ground beneath my feet.

Unfortunately the brewery was not the easiest of places to find and we ended up wandering around in the dimly lit hutongs long enough for our toes to become quite numb from the cold. At last we came across a small sign reading 'Great Leap Brewing' and stumbled into the semi-warmth of a sparsely furnished bar. We were greeted by a young Chinese man who told apologetically told us that the place was closed as the owners were away, but he must have noticed our crestfallen faces and told us that we could come in for a drink if we wanted. We gratefully sat down at the bar and ordered our drinks- I had a delicious chocolate stout whilst the boys went for pints of pumpkin ale. The man (apparantly the IT guy although at the time he seemed to be tending to the large fridges chilling the alcohol) served us a bowl of spicy nuts and as we chatted for a while about the owners it transpired that they hailed from Cleveland, Ohio, which also happened to be Dan's hometown. Eventually we said our goodbyes and vowed that if we had enough time, we would pay the place another visit before we went home.

On Christmas day our group of friends decided to go to one of our favourite restaurants in the area, a Japanese place where you can pay 58 kuai (about £5.80) for all-you-can-eat-and-drink for two hours in a little private room with a low table. The atmosphere was fantastic and I needn't have worried about not feeling festive as the Christmassy feeling seemed to be shared by everyone. After having stuffed ourselves with sushi, tempura and fried tofu, we sat round giving out secret Santa presents and taking part in a quiz set by my friend Alex which, incidentally, our team managed to win. That night we went out to a Korean bar and drank huge shots of a spirit called soju whilst each of us gave short speeches (most of which left me with tears in my eyes) about how much we would miss everyone and how thankful we were to have found such great friends whilst stranded over here. The evening was rounded off by hiring a room in a KTV karaoke bar, highlights of which included tuneless renditions of Bohemian Rhapsody and a bold attempt from Alex to rap a section of Justin Bieber's 'Baby'.

What can I say- Christmas in Beijing has been an unexpected yet unequivocal success! Now to get our heads down for the exams looming in the near future.. but it's not all doom and gloom as we're currently finalising plans and booking flights to go travelling around China in a couple of weeks. Until next time- zaijian!

An orange-tinted incident and other musings

I think with each new day I spend in Beijing I love this place a little bit more. I am now nearly halfway through my time spent here and already I am starting to get the odd pang of regret that the good times here won't last forever and that staying here is an experience that I'll probably never get to repeat again, or at least under the same circumstances.

My affections for this city are probably due in no small part to the friendliness and warmth of the locals here; whether chatting to the lady at our favourite little café serving baozi or asking a passer-by the directions to the subway station, all the while trying hard to decipher the gruff Beijing accent, we have always been made to feel incredibly welcome here despite our lack of any great competence in Chinese. It didn't take long for me to go from feeling a sense of fear and bewilderment upon arrival to realising that Beijing isn't really anything to be scared of and feeling that I could go wherever I wanted alone without being scared.

One evening a couple of weeks ago I was sitting in my room feeling at a bit of a loose end and mindlessly playing with my hair when I realised it could do with another splash of colour. I ambled down to Watson's (the Chinese equivalent of Boots) and came back with a packet of L'Oréal hair dye named something like Creamy Mocha, not having taken heed of the fact that the lady on the packet seemed to be of Chinese origin. After having put all of the strong-smelling dye into my hair it crossed my mind that maybe this product wasn't designed for fine, light-coloured caucasian hair but I decided to wait and see what the end result would be. Unfortunately upon washing the dye out my fears were reaffirmed as my hair seemed to be peculiarly lighter than before, and when drying it off I looked on aghast as my hair went from a dark auburn when wet to a fierce shade of amber when dry. It had also become dry as a bone and hideously static, which now means that stepping out of a car or taking off my coat and subsequently touching something results in myself or anyone involved getting a mini electric shock.

A few days later, after having tried and failed to learn to like my brassy mop, I plucked up the courage to make a trip to the hairdressers' on campus, thinking that my hair had probably suffered the worst already. I explained as best I could to a delicate-looking assistant what had happened, to which he smiled knowingly and asked 'do you know why the dye didn't work?' I nodded gravely and said that I'd realised it was designed for Chinese hair and he looked at me sympathetically, told me that he could help me and tried to talk me into paying for the most expensive hair colourant they had on offer. After telling him I was short on money, I settled for a more reasonably-priced colour and shortly after was whisked into a chair by a lady who told me a lot of things that I didn't quite understand and, probably before I could change my mind, was having another bottle of pungent dye painted into my hair. Whilst I waited nervously for the colouring process to take effect, a number of other employees of the place came up to me, either telling me more things that I didn't understand (I have become rather adept at the 'smile-and-nod' response in these kinds of situations) or trying to get me to pay for further lotions and potions to be put into my hair. When the time came for the dye to be washed out I was feeling more than a little dazed and my mind was racing as I wondered whether my hair could in fact have become even worse than it was before. Luckily the lady had done a fairly satisfactory job and so with a smile on my face I waved goodbye to Mr Delicate Hard-Sell and breathed a sigh of relief as I stumbled back out into the chilly Beijing twilight.

Lastly I thought I'd share with you this little beauty of a cake- for six kuai (about 60p) you can buy a masterpiece in the medium of icing and, although the sweetened cream to cake ratio was probably about three parts cream, one part sponge, I still managed to polish the whole thing off.