Pre-departure

So the next adventure is on the very close horizon. Next stop, Beijing. I have secured a teaching position in a school in fairly central Beijing for the next 10 months and during my time in China, I intend to travel as far and wide as possible (within reason). I have some definite destinations in mind, including Shanghai, Harbin, for the winter ice festival and Chengdu, to see the pandas, and many others that I am also going to try and squeeze in. Obviously being situated in Beijing there will be plenty to keep me occupied there too and all going well, during Spring Festival (January time) I would like to grab a summer holiday in Australia.

Teaching will take up most of my time so you can expect posts about life in school as well as my voyaging. Honestly, I have no idea what to expect. It's going to be an enormous adventure and probably quite testing, but I'm incredibly excited and it's finally starting to sink in that in two days I'll be on my way. I'm more or less packed, although trying to fit a years supply of clothes into a suitcase has proved rather challenging in itself. What with temperatures in Beijing varying between -10 and +30 Celcius, I have everything from wooly jumpers to flip flops in my luggage.

Otherwise, my preparation has been minimal, for example I can speak about 5 words of Mandarin and I am not proficient at using chopsticks. I am therefore anticipating a few very tricky months as I adjust to life in Asia. Finally, websites such as Facebook and apps like Whatsapp or Snapchat are not accessible in China so my social media presence will be nil, which it is anyway but now I have a genuine reason. For that reason, I will be documenting some of my travels in this blog, primarily for my future self to look back on, but also for anyone else that is curious about my 12 months in China.