I don’t know how to snow plough

So this blog is about an event which happened after last month and before this month. 

The event is obviously New Year!

A huge celebration in Scotland but not so celebrated in China as they have their own New Year Spring Festival which is entirely different. We decided in true Scottish style to do something special for New Year. On the last day of December we travelled all the way to Beijing. It was freezing cold! We were picked up from central Beijing to go to the Great Wall of China for the Great Wall Ski Festival.

We arrived in about 20 layers of clothes still freezing! I had to borrow Kirsty’s panda socks for an extra layer. We were in a mile long queue for the ski equipment but one of us had brought a speaker so we just had our own private party in the queue for about an hour. Now if you knew how good I was at skiing you would never have allowed me to attend this festival. My first trip down the baby slope was the scariest moment of my entire life. I didn’t know how to stop. People were screaming ‘snow plough’ and I was screaming back ‘I don’t know what that is’. I eventually stopped just before skiing into a fence. After someone explained how to stop I decided to try again - this time with much more success. It was so much fun!

After the skiing at midnight we all went to the top of the Great Wall on a ski lift and stayed there until the bells. Not many people can say they saw 2018 in at the top of the Great Wall of China! Was such an amazing experience.

In January I also went back to Scotland for a wee holiday. I went from Beijing to London and then eventually to Glasgow. I slept in the back of the car all the way back to Edinburgh. I may have been more excited to see Scottish food than to see your friends and family! Joking! I spent most of January drinking coffee with friends and eating curries and pizza with my family. Well worth the 13 hour travel on my own.

It was so worthwhile to travel back half way through the scholarship to tell everyone about all my experiences so far and if anything it made me realise how much I wanted to come back to Tianjin to do the last term in China and learn even more! So that’s what happened in January for me, lots of good experiences!