Xavier's Gap Year

Day 124 (27th of June, 2016) – Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China Last night, I farewelled my first Western friend, Anthony, with a quick drink. My Chinese friend, Todd, also came along. Todd brought along a particularly peculiar but delightful gift for everyone. He had dug through our social media accounts to find a good picture of […]

Day 117 (20th of June, 2016) – Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China Consider this week’s blog the ‘calm before the storm’. It’s my last week of classes and exams at Jiangsu Normal University. Next week, I’ll explore every last crevasse that this city has to offer before moving onto bigger and better things – Shanghai, Sichuan, Tibet, […]

Day 110 (13th of June, 2016) – Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China This morning, unlike most Monday mornings, I woke up at a reasonable hour. I headed home early after spending the previous evening at Fusion Bar. The conversations at the bar were incredibly entertaining. Most of my night was spent talking with “Old Tony”, who’s a […]

Day 103 (6th of June, 2016) – Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China I woke up this morning after a night out in the city centre with some of the Ukrainians. The bar there is called ‘Fusion’, and it’s the closest thing which Xuzhou has to a reputable venue. It’s owned by my colleague at the English school. […]

Day 96 (30th of May, 2016) – Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China I woke up in Nanjing bright and early at 6:30am in order to log onto the ‘Splendour in the Grass’ ticket resale. For those of you who don’t know, Splendour is a 3-day music festival near Byron. This year, not only does it sport one […]

Day 89 (23rd of May, 2016) – Guilin, Guangxi Province, China To continue from where I left off, I arrived in the early hours of the morning to my hostel in Shanghai. It was huge, to say the least. Three or so floors of air-conditioned goodness lay before me. For AU$8/night, this was the best […]

Day 82 (16th of May, 2016) – Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China It was only at 4am this morning that I managed to crawl into bed. After a long night of study (of which I clearly underestimated the time required) and a few hours crafting this blog, I finally got the sleep which I have so […]

Day 75 (9th of May, 2016) – Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China Mondays offer my only chance at a sleep in, and so despite being a bit overloaded with work, I decided to sleep until midday. It’s a poor habit to accumulate lots of sleep debt and then purge it all in one big rest, and […]

Day 68 (2nd of May, 2016) – Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China At 4am, I arose to the bleating of my alarm clock. It is remarkably easy to wake up early when it is at your own discretion as opposed to someone else’s. The campus was much more beautiful with empty streets and a midnight blue […]

Day 61 (25th of April, 2016) – Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China After only a few hours of sleep, I woke up at 5am and donned my blazer for the ANZAC Day Dawn Service to be held at the Australian Consulate General to Shanghai. The 1.6x surge pricing on Uber was a pretty tell-tale sign that its […]