I said I would return after the stress of exams disappeared, and I didn’t lie!
So…this means I should get back to writing.
This post therefore shall be a ‘what’s happened in the last bit of time since forever then?’ post.
I have, as I said right at the start there, finished my exams and officially no longer a school student. It may be a year late, but I got to the end eventually! Next stop on life’s journey is China and I found out since last time i wrote exactly where I am going. My home for a year will be a city called ‘Kuitun‘ in ‘xinjiang’ province (which I recently found yesterday I have been pronouncing wrong…).
So! A little about xinjiang! It is the most north-west province in China, sharing borders with countries such as Mongolia, tajikistan, Pakistan and even a tiny little bit of Russia. In other words, it’s big. The biggest in China in fact. Apparently it may just be around three times the size of France. For just one province…
It is also the world’s most inland region. So not surprisingly, large areas are desert. Having spent my life so far in the UK – not known for its great deserts – this will be an experience. This particular desert is the Gobi desert, which (I believe) is famous for being the end of the Silk road. If living in a desert in an obscure part of China for a year can’t get me writing again, I don’t know what can…so watch this space over the next year, as as long as I actually can get onto wordpress through the Chinese internet censoring etc, this blog should be flooding with exciting things. If not, there will definitely be a blog from me in some form or the other, somewhere hidden on the internet.
The real reason I’ve put the title I have here as the Title was (other than the self-explanatory ni hao (without the tones! Oh how horrible it is to look at without them!)) that I just happened to be listening to a song of the same name (anathema – the beginning and the end), but it seemed to fit rather nicely. My exams finish, signalling the end of school – something which, although it is not amazing to admit it, ends up essentially being a person’s life until they leave it. That is the ‘end’. At the same time, it is the beginning. The beginning of something fresh and new. “Nothing that doth change, but doth suffer a sea change”. Sorry, Shakespeare just felt right there. Changed slightly so it fits better. Within a few months I will know if I will spend my university years in London or Aberdeen, and prior to going I will be in China. As far as I’m concerned, there aren’t many things which are a new ‘beginning’ as that.
And I hope that words come streaming from it. There has been a great lack of them outside of essays for far too long.
Disclaimer! The picture, although the same desert, is in mongolia and not Xinjiang! It is a rather large desert, stretching into many countries.
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