It was more like a casual walk onto the plane, which had a dire lack of entertainment. But I occupied myself with reading, sleeping and balancing my accounts for the year 2007. All that I could conclude was a lot a money was spent at McDonalds.

I was privileged to have my flatmate organise a birthday party for me at Starbucks upon my return (a lot of money was also spent there in 2007). Despite the horrific jet-lag, it was much better than my actual birthday spent in hospital.

The jet lag remains but now I am back to the teaching routine. My Chinese is really rusty and my teacher is going to be disappointed when she finds out I have done no work in the past month.

It’s the same as English electricity. Today, I went with my housemate to buy some electricity for the apartment. China runs on a pre-payment system. This is handy for me because I would otherwise need a bank account, which is hard for a non-Chinese to get. However, it did mean a one-hour queue at the bank. There were at least 70 other Chinese people in front of us when we arrived. It stretched out of the door and my feet painfully froze. If I had not woken up an hour late, I could have saved my feet.

The whole year’s electricity will cost me just £43.33 (650 RMB). Which is a lot less than the large sums of money that I handed over to nPower (British utility company) whilst I was living in Nottingham. Later, I managed to work out that electricity costs three times as much in Britain. It is 3p per unit in China compared to about 9-12p per unit. (Incidentally the units are kilowatt-hours for the technically minded).

So it is not worth buying energy saving bulbs unless you run it for more than 2 hours a day and plan to live here for more than a year. Yes, I was calculating this when I was shopping for light bulbs.

I’ve been planning my lessons this evening. I wanted to do a discussion about the differences between Western and Chinese culture with my students. Google did not provide a straightforward answer – I found a mixture of tourist web sites, angry message board posts and even an academic paper.  Finally, I found a blog post with simple diagrams of the differences between Westerners and Chinese here. According to the blog post the pictures were done by a Chinese student called Liu Young who was  born in China and educated in Germany.

Cultural differences have always affected my life. I was raised by thoroughly Chinese parents but hold strong British values. Now I am living in China: working in a school with Koreans; socialising with a predominantly-American English department; encountering confused Chinese locals (my Chinese is still not good); and living with a Polish house-mate. Where does it end?

For a long time I suffered from a perpetual Anglo-Sino identity crisis. Nowadays I am settled with who I am. But I still get annoyed at Chinese people jumping ahead of my in the queue at McDonald’s. Some things never change.