Doorways: Red Light District, Amsterdam

I think if I lived here, I'd worry about my door getting fly posterd over one night...

Sussex Mithras

A Sussex castle park is probably not the place that you would expect to find a Mithraic relic. (If religions of the ancient Near East aren’t really your thing, then Mithras was a sun god, often represented as a bull, whose cult was popular during the middle Roman Empire, for a while rivalling Christianity as a somewhat frowned upon underground movement. If you google it, you realise that there are plenty of people out there anything but time poor.)

This column top, was ‘found’ (perhaps Roget’s thesaurus hasn’t quite got around to listing found as a synonym for looted from) in Sevastopol, presented to the Norfolk family and ever since has been exposed to the elements in the park.

This cued quite some ranting about the cheek of describing something clearly purloined as ‘found’, and the subsequent damage down to this interesting cultural relic – in a country that repeatedly tells the Greeks they’re not fit to look after the Elgin Marbles.

Still, the views were nice.

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Fading Fun Fair

Skywatch Friday

Doorways: Bei Chang Jie

I have a confession. I love photographing doorways. Open, closed, scruffy, peeling posters, graffitied, classically smart...there's a place for them all on my memory card.

But...I rarely share them. Strangely, I keep forgetting to do the 'checkout this door' post, leaving all my doorways lingeringly slightly resentfully on the hard drive, muttering about how the sky pictures get unfair precedence. So, a mid week mini-series is born.

Changing My World

How has going to China changed my world?

When I went away I was looking for something, I wanted something to change and I didn’t know what. I wondered if I would have an epiphany, or a grand love affair, or if my life would change in a startling fashion.

China did change me, shifting something inside – not an immediate dramatic change but something that I think is going to change me even more. I realised and confronted by huge, intense fear of failure.

Ok, I know, it’s hardly like anyone enjoys or sets out to fail, but for almost all my life fear of failure has been my primary motivator, and I’ve lived to the sound of my inner voice telling me that I am a complete and utter failure.

I failed. Some of my early lesson were truly disastrous. They were too easy or too hard. I didn’t realise that what to me were self evident activities, like having a discussion, were bizarre concepts from the planet foreign teacher.

And then… My classes started to come alive, as I learnt from my failures adjusted my classes to the abilities and interests of the students. I think this is the first time that I actually realised that failure is not necessarily absolute and the end of the world.

I lived alongside people who had experiences of hardship that were almost unbelievable – history book and news stories made flesh. And these people impressed me every day with their ability to dream, their determination to make a better life for themselves and, moreover, that they weren’t embarrassed to admit to their ambitions.

I started to wonder why I was so afraid of doing something I cared about, why I had censored myself so completely that I automatically dismissed anything that interested me as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘impractical’. I started to feel that I should take advantage of my privileges, dare to risk listening to myself and act upon it, and that if I should fail it will not destroy me. (There are other experiences lurking behind this revelation too.)

Now, of course, comes the hard part: trying to maintain this when surrounded by well meaning advice and expectations about how my life ‘should’ be, having slipped into familiar routines.

Photographs are from the 798 gallery area, Beijing - a place I love as it's filled with inspiring works and stories.

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Love/Hate

en route to the gym

Things I miss about China:

· Moments where I’d think ‘wow, I’m LIVING in China’
· Backstreet barbeques, ‘our’ restaurant, the wonton shop
· My students (some of them!)
· The markets selling delicious fruit and vegetables and snacks
· Despite the language barrier and occasional shoddy taxi drivers, the relative ease of getting around
· The people watching
· The continual sense of discovery
· The satisfaction when I managed to say something in Mandarin and someone actually understood me
· Getting free entry, free drinks and free snacks in nightclubs (we were like an added attraction)
· Going to places I never thought I’d visit

what the local park looks like at the moment

Things I don’t:

· Being at the internet mercy of the Great Firewall of China
· Feeling like I was permanently on display from the moment I left my apartment
· Having ‘Hello’ screamed at me repeatedly by random strangers
· Shoddy taxi drivers
· Finding it almost impossible to purchase clothes not covered in spangles or cartoon characters
· Only being able to get decent coffee at McDonalds
· Having to go to Beijing to get English books

· The spitting – well, until I started doing in myself

a sneaky snap of one of my classes

Once Upon a Time in China

this supermarket kept me in coffee and chocolate - what more could I ask for?

Let me tell you about one of my proudest moments in China, the moment when I first thought: I can do this, I can survive here, everything’s going to be fine. This epiphany didn’t happen over seeing one of the many wondrous historical sights, or contemplating the small scale diplomacy I was engaged with everyday. It happened over an alarm clock.

The purchasing of the alarm clock at the supermarket – my first unaccompanied visit – had been fraught enough. There had been extreme confusion over the method of having to pay: choosing the clock and communicating this choice through some comedy gestures, taking a handwritten slip to a booth, handing over my money and getting a my slip stamped, then returning to the electronics area to get the clock. Completing this process involved a lot of pointing, a lot of lost wandering, a lot of me thinking ‘I can’t understand anything, what on earth have I done coming to this crazy country, was I insane, when can I go home?’


the courtyard and entrance to the senior school building

So imagine my dismay when the clock stopped the next day. I was sorely tempted to just go back and buy another one, seeing as at least I now knew how this process worked. But…I hadn’t gone to China to teach English, not speaking any Chinese and with no teaching experience, to avoid doing things because I had no idea how to do it.

Armed with my phrasebook and the ability to say ‘ni hao’ and ‘xie xie’ (hello and thank you), I took the clock and my handful of receipts back to the store. I toddled up to what I presumed to be the information desk, and for once I was right.

I ‘ni haoed’ in my friendliest fashion and pointed to the ‘I need a refund, this is broken’ section in my phrasebook, then at the dysfunctional alarm clock. The staff behind the counter not unreasonably spoke to me in what seemed like tongues and then realised that the laowai who probably looked like she’d been smacked around the face with a wet fish didn’t speak any Chinese. They conferred amongst themselves.

The one who’d drawn the short straw of dealing with me came to inspect the phrasebook and the clock: I pointed and gestured again, then they conferred again. This happened a few times, and then they pointed towards the electronics department.

my street

After waiting for a member of staff to appear in the electronics department, I repeated the pointing routine. I’m not sure who was more over-awed: me at trying to deal with this through my jet lag and general confusion or the shop assistant at having to deal with a real, live foreigner.

After some more conferring and demonstration of why the clock was broken, and that another battery did not solve the problem, and a few members of staff trying, rather unsuccessfully, to appear to casually wander past, I had a new, working clock.

I left the shop on perhaps the most unexpected legal high I’ve ever had.