Screetching around a corner in central Fukang I noticed a statue. A 10ft horse stood on its hinds legs above a globe with a large inscription written in traditional Chinese characters beneath. I shyly asked Mr Tian what the statue was aboout. Breifly removing his fourth cigerette from his mouth he replied in his rough voice: 'It says Fukang is the Worlds Traveller City'. How appropriate. Over the course of 2 weeks I had travelled 9098 miles (by my rough calcula...

Hello again, last blog I told you about the beginning of my time in Beijing but I didn't write much as it was so hectic. Well the next 5 days were even busier! Instead of going day by day I'll just fill in some of the events... Firstly we moved out of the youth hostel and in with host families. My host family was absolutley great. About two minutes from Beijing Number 50 Middle School the apartment we were in was 5 floors up overlooking a very busy cross roads. ...

Disclaimer - The detail in my first few blogs from China reflects only the intensity of the days and not as an indicator to the frequency of future blog posts... TravelingThere's only two things of note from my incredibly long yet surprising mundane journey across the world; the window view and the airports. The route from Heathrow to Hong Kong went over Urumqi and while I was looking at the lights (at some unknown time) I may have seen the lights from my projec...

I'm currently writing this hundreds of feet up in the air above Hull (or close enough), but will be posting in Heathrow. So, this is actually happening? I'm going to to use this blog for aims and expectations; then review when I'm doing the same flight (in reverse) in a years time! First and foremost, what are my aims for this year? 1. Get to a reasonable level of Mandarin. Probably the most asked question before I left was some version of "Do you speak Mandar...

It's a very English tradition to talk about the weather. So, naturally, one of my first inquiries into the region I would be staying in for a year was to check what the weather was like. And, well, it's quite different...Despite being further south than where I live now the winters are much harsher; falling to an average of -12.6C across January. Yet Fukang is only a couple of hundred kilometers from Turpan, where the temperature hit 49.7C in 2008. As you can im...