Recently by Nikki Aaron

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. Don't get me wrong, I love this country, but along with the many things that I love comes a variety of things that are unsatisfactory. China is a developing country, you can't expect all the western privileges that we were born into, but that's still not something that I would consider compromising for my idealistic imaginary family.

Air and environment
First and foremost, the quality of the air in Beijing is unquestionably going to effect on peoples' health. I have found myself short of breath and with black dust on my hands after venturing out in Beijing. It's a product of Beijing's rapid development, and one that unfortunately isn't going to see any improvements soon. Living here, I sometimes feel that it's a risk I am taking with my health, and one that I am not willing to take on my future children's'.

The health scares
After the san yuan melamine health scares last year, another has recently been publicized in the English language media. According to the Beijing Evening News, there have been cases of students suffering with headaches and fainting after guzzling down Sprite.
Food and drink products are ones which we put an enormous amount of trust into, wherever we are in the world. And when things like this happen, it scares me.

The schooling
As a foreigner in china, your children will undoubtedly require dual-language schooling, which requires an international school. Unless you are an expatriate family living and china, in which case you'd probably receive free housing and schooling for your children, you are looking at 20,000 pounds a year school fees. Incredible! I know unqualified English teachers who know little more about teaching the English language than being brought up in a country speaking it who work in these schools. So is the money really worth it?

Of course, no city or country is without its flaws. I'm taking a very idealized view of my 'perfect' imaginary family and the kind of Walton style lives we'll have. But it begs to question, where we should position ourselves to give our children the best advantages. Is coming back to the UK the best decision all round, or should we venture elsewhere.

So, I put it to you; Where is the best 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.

The year of the tiger is said to ward off any household disasters, such as fire, theft and ghosts. However, if you are a tiger yourself, that is born in the year of the tiger, the year is believed to be unlucky for you. As with all other signs, if we find ourselves in the year of our own sign, the Chinese believe that we should wear the colour red to ward away bad luck.

Believe it or not, this year will actually be the first Chinese new year that I have spent in china. Usually I take advantage of the national holiday and come back to the UK. So this is year is extra special for me, and I've been researching and taking notes from my Chinese friends to learn about what will be expected of me when I join a Chinese family for the biggest festival on their calendar. Here's what I've learned;

1. Gifts aren't necessary
Unlike Christmas, gifts aren't a big thing during the Spring Festival. In some ways, I find it difficult to imagine children becoming excited by Chinese new year if there are no gifts, and no indulgences, but my boyfriend insists that when he was a child, he would become very excited about the fireworks and the hongbao (a red enveloped with money inside given to the children of the family by relatives and friends).
However, being the only foreign face in the crowd, I guess they might expect something a bit different, and I have bought a few gifts to take along for the family - I hope they appreciate that it's more of a 'thanks for having me', than a 'let's make it more like Christmas' gesture.

2. Offer to make the jiaozi
Jiaozi are like dumplings...well, I kind of think they're more like ravioli. They're boiled pasta-like bags with meat and vegetables inside, so yeah, I think they're like giant ravioli. It's these jiaozi that are the traditional food of Chinese New Year, and I've been told that it's very courteous and traditional for me to offer to help make the jiaozi. Expect disastrous stories post-chinese new year about this!

2. Fireworks
The thing about fireworks, despite them being quite pretty, is the louder the noise the better. The loud noises are believed to scare away evil spirits and keep us safe in the New Year. The previous few years, I've returned to china at the end of February or sometimes even the beginning of March, and the fireworks and firecrackers are still being set off. For a foreigner living alone in the middle of Beijing, this can feel quite scary and what I'd imagine a snippit of the blitz to have been like.

3. The city is a ghost town
I've become very used to there always being people around. You can walk around the city at any time of the day or night, and you will see people around. At first it may have felt odd, but now it's comforting. I hadn't released how used to living in the most overpopulated country in the world until we had a one week festival back in October called Mid-Autumn Festival. Of course, during festivals, people want to be with their families, but what I didn't realize is that a huge amount of people who live in the capital, are actually from smaller towns around china. So when they all return home, Beijing becomes eerily quiet and feeling quite deserted.

4. Mah-jiang is a must
I am very aware that mah-jiang is a popular game in china. Every park in the city is chock-full old folks sitting around on benches playing the games for hours on end. I like to think of Mah-jiang as the Chinese peoples' monopoly or dominoes, I guess. But then, how many of us actually dust of the old games and play a game of monopoly? I took the time to educate myself in the game of Mah-jiang, which seems pretty straight-forward and a game of matching up pairs. Then I was informed that the Mah-jiang that most of these people are playing is actually Taiwanese Mah-jiang, which is indeed a trifle more complicated than the former.

So, this spring festival, so long as I don't insult people with my gifts, poion people with my jiaozi and cry over the fireworks, I still have ample opportunity to embarrass myself with not understanding the rules to mah-jiang. As if communicating solely in Chinese was not enough stress. But then I'm sure I'll get even when I take my boyfriend back to UK to spend Christmas with my family.

大家新年快乐! - Happy New Year everyone!
How to say it in Chinese (da jia xīn nián kuài lè)

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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Proving that we really are the country which embraces all cultures, food and...err, animals, Walkers have introduced their new trial flavour 'Cajun Squirrel'.

During my time in China I have ingested some questionable things, jelly fish, grasshopper and fish face, being amongst a few of the local delicacies, which I am often urged to share details of when attending parties here in the UK. But now, perhaps, the English can take away first prize for the most bizarrely flavoured crisps, replacing the Cucumber flavour crisps which have become a personal favourite of mine in Beijing.

Has anybody ever heard of a more bizarre flavour than Squirrel?

I always thought that those Little Women were just being a tad materialistic, but this year I realised that they were right when they famously said; "Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without any presents." What I have come to realise is that Christmas really isn't Christmas without the presents...turkey, family arguments, hangovers, overeating, burnt roast potatoes, debt, brussell sprouts, and everything else that we completely take for granted!

However, westerners living in Beijing will strive to do their utmost to keep tradition alive by drinking and being as merry as they can manage to be. With Beijing being as westernised as it is, there is definitely no shortage of Christmas trees, festive decorations and St. Nick effigies, we feel the excitement there, but it all feels a tad redundant when on Christmas morn there is no family and no presents to unwrap.

When you've been living in china long enough, you begin to learn that you must find your excitement elsewhere. And when you have become truely easternised (myself not yet being qualified, having only been in china 2 years), you'll have been counting down the days to the Chinese new years celebrations, or what is also known as Spring festival.

Like our Christmas, Chinese New Year is the biggest event on the calendar in china, and the only time in the year that every person gets enough time to travel to their home towns and relax with their families. Not wanting to feel completely abandoned and alone in Beijing, I decided to do the exact same thing and travel home to visit my family and friends in good ol' Blighty.

Feelings of excitement mixed with nerves engulfed me as I arrived at Heathrow, and I felt slightly intimidated by the seemingly tall and burly built people at the airport. Strangest thing is, though, as soon as I arrived home I felt like I hadn't even been away. My mother had redecorated and my younger brothers had grown, but there were no radical changes, and nothing knew to adapt to, just an overwhelming feeling of safety and comfort.

Yet worryingly, I can't help but feel that I have perhaps 'outgrown' my home...I guess this is all part of growing up, becoming independent and finding a new and different sort of home in a new and different sort of country.

It's no big secret to anyone in Beijing that the sex trade is very much alive and openly available to anyone minus the naming and shaming that one might receive back home in Blighty. My rationale being that foreign men feel that because they are away from their own country they think they can get away with behaving a bit more boyish, and ever so badly. One might be fooled into believing that the redly-lit massage parlours with the pretty-faced young Chinese girls are there for no more than one looking for a quick shoulder rub, but as any guy will tell you, "you may get more than you bargained for".

Expatriate male friends of mine have excitedly engaged us with the unnecessary details of the kinds of mischief they have gotten into at the elusive karaoke houses in Beijing, in which men are presented with their choice of naked Chinese girls to fulfill their every whim. All comes at a price, of course, and if you're not happy with the price, you negotiate. How comforting to know that you can not only haggle over the price of your new shoes, but also your next lay.

Expat men can indulge themselves until they are so exhausted that they have to go home and back to 'reality'. As you can imagine, the lives of the expat women is not nearly as much 'fun'. Expat women marginally sit back, sip their vodka and tonics, and shake their heads as they watch another expat man's ego rocket through the roof when a beautiful Chinese girl gives him a second glance in a nightclub. But what does he care what the expat women think? This isn't the real world; this may as well be Never-never land. Well, guys, Captain Hook lived in Never-never land too and look what kind of reputation he got for himself!

I have said it once and I will say it again; I LOVE the China Daily newspaper. LOVE it. Nothing beguiles me more than to read about the lives of others, especially the lives of the Chinese folk. After living in the UK for 24 years, nothing ceased to amaze me with the people of Britain, so living in China I have been thrilled, amazed and down-right fascinated by things that people do, and more to the point, WHY they do them.

Check out this recent story, courtesy of the Shanghai Evening Post:

Disgruntled Son Hides In Sewer From Family

A man in Shanghai sat tight in a filthy sewer for more than an hour to hide from family members.
Ye, a Shanghai local in his early 30s, had quarreled with his kin and decided to hide from them in the cesspit.
After police found him hiding in a sewer with a diameter less than 1m, they feared he would suffocate amid the dirty water and slime.
Too big to follow him and wholly reluctant to do so anyway, they kept beckoning Ye to come out of his own accord.
They eventually coaxed him out.

There's just two things I yearn to know about this story. 1. What did the family quarrel about that made him take such drastic measures? 2. Ok, so in China there aren't really any proper pubs, but how about visiting a bar, or just taking a walk? I mean, was there really no other alternative than to sit in the sewer??!

People are fascinating.

Autumn in the city is Beijing at its best. The days are beautifully sunny, the air is fresh and clean, and everybody feels invigorated and ready for winter after their October week-long holiday. And what do Chinese people do during their October break? Hike mountains, go to the suburbs, or generally escape to anywhere that has a little fresh air. Having climbed my mountain, and survived, I spent the rest of the week in city, and completely lost! The city was eerily quiet without the horn-tooting and the singing outside my window at 6am.

Having recharged our batteries, everyone is back on full form and counting down the days until the arrival of the Kate Moss Topshop range in Beijing...or is that just me who is as excited as a kid at Christmas?

This month Avril Lavigne and Linkin Park visit Beijing, however the hoards of Linkin Park fans have been massively disappointed in finding out today that all 5 dates of their Asia tour have been cancelled due to lead singer Chester Bennington having sustained a back injury. Hopefully not due to an October holiday hiking mishap.

The rest of October looks set to be an exciting time for me. I've agreed to run a 10k marathon next Sunday, but having been so busy have not had time to train at all! Luckily I've booked myself in for a well-deserved trip to the mountains (where else), at a yoga retreat. The weekend is a 'back to basics' escape from the city, with yoga, calligraphy, chanting and drumming. Just hope they throw in a free massage, too... I think I'm going to need it after that 10k crawl to the finish line.