Travelling (Hannah)

Hey it’s Hannah, the last two months have been an adventure to say the least. Let’s start in January when I and 2 other scholars decided to travel around China a bit. We planned the trip a month in advance to ensure time for budgeting and proper planning. In the end we visited Shanghai, Xi’an, Chengdu and Chongqing. They were all amazing, but I think Shanghai and Chongqing were my personal favourite.  We used a mixture of sleeper-trains, bullet trains, trams, taxis and a plane to move around the country. Our longest duration of transport was 15.5 hours on a sleeper train, which wasn’t as hellish as it sounds.  I was able to tick things off my bucket list like seeing the Oriental Peral in Shanghai and visiting the Chengdu Panda Breeding Research Centre to meet Hua Hua the panda. It was interesting to travel to a different part of the country and experience the shift in culture and accent. We were consistently practicing and improving our mandarin as we moved through provinces.

In the second half of the holiday, I very spontaneously went to Thailand. Erin and I visited Bangkok, Changmai and Phuket. It was a great change to the chilly Tianjin weather and I was able to try so many things I’ve never done before like attending a Muay Thai fight, visiting an ethical elephant sanctuary, exploring so many cool temples and doing an ATV course through the jungle. We travelled around the country using overnight buses so we could budget our accommodation and transport fee. A quick tip: Thailand still predominantly uses cash so make sure you always have enough and every cash withdrawal in Thailand cost around £5 so take out money in large amounts.