Recently by Nikki Aaron

It doesn't matter who we are, every one of us has a motive for staying long-term in Beijing, and it tends to fall into one of two categories; for career or for love.
If you have the best of one of them already, then you count your blessings, but is it really possible to have both the great career and the great relationship?

Ask a majority of the expat women in Beijing about their dating habits and they will tell you the same thing; that there is a distinct lack of nice men in Beijing, and how they all end up dating men whom, if they were in their home country, they would never have given a second glance.

The lucky, lucky expatriate men find that in Beijing they have super powers. Suddenly they're getting all this attention from pretty Chinese girls. The female expat community watch in horror as they see the class nerd strutting down Sanlitun like he's John Travolta, and feel their standards slip even further down their leg as they find themselves thinking, "hmm, he's looking quite hot tonight."

It has become a normality of everyday life to see a foreign guy with a local Chinese girl on his arm, but still a rarity to see foreign girls walking hand in hand with a local Chinese guy.

It has been speculated that this is because a lot of people haven't moved past the traditional perception that Chinese guys are shorter and weaker than their western counterparts, and therefore unable to satisfy the needs of a western woman. Surely this cannot be true?

When I first moved to shanghai, me and my roommate used to take walks and then come back and babywipe ourselves so that we could 'ewww' at the amount of dirt and dust that had attached itself to our skins.

In Beijing, the air is so dry that I now need to slather five or six layers of moisturiser on my face before it feels normal and soft again.

Actually, I hadn't realized how scaly I was becoming with just my single layer of lanolin cream twice a day, until my 11-year-old Korean student touched my face and remarked on how differently my skin felt to his.

After the suffocating sandstorms in Beijing recently, it's been good to escape the organised chaos and take a trip to Singapore.

I've been to Singapore twice before, and coming from Beijing, it never ceases to amaze me just how clean, controlled and so much more practical so many things are in comparison to the city I have come to call "home".

I have given China 3 year of my life so far, and estimating another 2 here before I move on. But recently, as most late twenties girls do, I've been secretly evaluating living styles of the more family-esque type.
Yes, I am feeling the urger, the biological clock, or whatever it is called, and I've started thinking less like the single woman and more in the sense of when I'd like to start a family, what type of mother I'd be, and most pressingly, where would I most like to raise my family.

And I have come to one decision quite easily. Beijing is not the place to raise a family.

The 3rd sign of the Chinese zodiac, the tiger, begins it's year long reign on the February 14th this year.
However, much alike our western new year, the most exciting day is actually the eve. But unlike in the west where we find the most exciting party and drink with friends, lovers and, more often than not, a bunch of strangers, the Chinese New Years Eve is spent with family.
In fact, the Chinese New Year 's Eve is the most important family day of the year. Needless to say that the seriousness of my and my boyfriends' relationship is left without doubt, now that I have been invited to share this day with his family.

Living in China, so far away from home, you learn a lot. One of the biggest things you learn is how great stuff back in England is. You appreciate so much more; your family, PG Tips, the green cross code, Walkers cheese and onion crisps, your grandma's cooking, your friends, Eastenders and Sunday newspapers, to name but a few. These are things that (I think) we take for granted everyday of our lives. It isn't until they're not there anymore, that you realize they're quite irreplaceable. Oh how I look forward to hearing the familiar opening tones of the Coronation Street. It sounds sad, but these are things that us English have grown up with and however insignificant they may sound, represent home to us. The sounds of Coronation Street are as soothing to me as the smell of Sunday lunch, and the sound of lawns being mowed on the weekend and GMTV.

So yes, I will be happy to escape Beijing at this most special time of the year, and then I'll be back and ready to celebrate the biggest Chinese festival of the year - Chinese New Year, on February 14th. This is usually the time that I catch a flight home to see my family, so I've never actually experienced the beginning of the Chinese New Year from China. I hear there's lots of fireworks, drinking of the Baijiu - a very, very strong liquor, that tastes like what I'd imagine lighter fluid to taste, and watching the celebrations on TV with the family. So after a family Christmas in England, I'll be flying back to my new home for Chinese New Year with my boyfriend's Chinese family.

Now this sounds like a much better arrangement than the past two years; Expatriates doing their best to conjure up some festive spirit in China, and just ending up very drunk, and then being in England in January and February, when the sales are good, but the weather is cold, and everybody's penny pinching and looking forward to the summer time, just isn't quite the same.
Yes, this year will be good.

When youtube was blocked, us expats in China handled it well. Yes, it was quite frustrating at first, but you get by. A life without youtube is still livable, and as a result we looked elsewhere and discovered Chinese alternatives and in some documented cases, actually replaced our youtube fixes with more productive things, like hmmmm, I don't know, studying mandarin..?

In the past we've often had our Favourite networking and video sharing sites taken away from us, much alike naughty school children having their footballs confiscated, and just like school our balls were usually given back to us at the end of the week. However this time we've been waiting to get our youtube back for about 5 months. But we didn't despair too much, because for all the time we missed searching and sharing videos of our lives, we found a replacement; Facebook.

Facebook changed everything for all of us, because now we are in touch with practically everyone we ever met. And not just can we add them to our friend 'list', but we can actually keep on top of everyone's thoughts and daily routines (thanks to the daily newsfeed), and we literally can spend hours checking through photographs, adding our own photographs, and snooping into other peoples' lives. That was until....(dun dun dunnnnn)...Facebook was also blocked. Ohhh the outcry of the thousands of expats in China! And from that moment, the expats of china officially went cold turkey. Call it a lifestyle revolution, if you like. I actually found it quite liberating. But as I marveled at all of the spare time I found I had in my life post-Facebook, what I didn't realize was that the other die-hard expats were desperately searching for a loop-hole that could get them back into Facebook land. Did they succeed? Of course. Never underestimate an expat who's in need of a Facebook fix.

Beijing is full of examples of magnificent architecture; the infamous CCTV tower, other known as 'the trousers', the birds nest, the water cube. And these are just the world famous ones! In reality, when you live in Beijing everyday is a full of surprises. Every week new buildings appear as if from nowhere, none of which, however, remind me of home...or so I thought. This new building, which has recently been completed, or recently landed from outer space, reminds me of a little place I once knew called Birmingham. Take a look at the pic and let me know what you think!

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