Mobbs' Memoir 5: Reverse Culture Shock

So, I'm back in China, back to my usual life. After 4 years away from my home country, England, I decided, now out of work, I'd have a visit. I had previously planned a visit but delayed just enough to miss seeing my Granddad before he died by about a month, so I have been feeling a need to go back for some time. People age, people change, I wanted to see how and by how much.

I also just... needed air. Needed Oxygen. You know, being human and all. It sometimes feels somewhat of a luxury where I live, even though Shanghai is one of the better mega cities compared to, say, Beijing.

So I was beyond pleased when I started seeing this as I passed over Italy on the plane:

And upon arriving at my hotel in my hometown, Leicester, the sky was just as wonderful from below (aside from those evil chemtrails you can see trying to pass as clouds).

It's in stark contrast to China, where often you can barely tell when you leave the clouds until the wheels hit the ground. I remember feeling miserable flying from The Netherlands to China, watching over 12 hours or so, the clouds go from fluffy and white, to misty and brown-grey. Welcome Home.

You might have gathered by this point that this post will have nothing of excitement for you, but to me, all the little things I saw that a local might never dedicate a glance to, made me smile and feel more free than I have in a long time.

I decided to be more active during my time here and so I left my hotel the next day to visit my sister. I had mapped it out on my phone and decided, despite it being over an hour's walk to the city centre, I'd do it. I ended up doing it the next day, too.

It was super peaceful. The road I was walking down, a dual carriageway, barely had a single car on it at any given moment.

And I must have seen a total of 2 people the whole way until I got into town. This is practically impossible where I am. I can walk down the side alley at 3am, perhaps, but as soon as I turn right there are people even then, making food for the next day, cycling for whatever reason and so forth.

To me, the simple image of an empty street was blowing my mind. And then I turned left, to the wall of nature following me into town. I was breathing life back into my lungs as I went.

Happy spiders and berries, even some raspberries I could have picked but perhaps they were a little over-ripe. Now to be clear, this isn't a tourist spot, far from it. It's basically nowhere, but even here I stopped and noticed a little nature trail.

This is bog-standard in England and you see them crossing fields and farms all over the country, but again, any green nature of any kind here in China is utterly man made, full of tourists and half the locals who seek a few hours' getaway during their time off.

Mostly, you are not to walk on any grass that exists because it's few and far between. You can walk on the allotted concrete paving if you want, but try not to bump into the 30,000 kids.

Leicester? Nobody. In fact, there were so few people as I walked into the little tunnel of trees, that I decided to take a pee to fully appreciate how many people there weren't.

At the end of the tree tunnel there was an orchard and a lot of unkept shrubbery and such, but I had a destination to reach so I turned back and continued on.

It was around here, though on the second day, on a slightly alternative but parallel route, that I inadvertently inhaled a huge breath of autumn. It was one of those smells that instantly teleports you back 10, 20 years to a time when things were good. Here I would be playing with leaves, sorting their colours, throwing sticks up into the trees to try and knock down conkers which I would collect in entire black bags for no particular reason.

I had no choice but to start kicking the piles into a slightly different mess on the side of the roads, which made me think back to all kinds of minor details of my youth. One in particular was the double-glazing on the windows of the houses I passed. I remember my old house getting the new windows installed and they had these interesting, stain-glass pictures in the center of the opening part of the windows, just to add a bit of character. Others might just have simple metallic cross-sections for whatever reason.

Such a mundane memory, I know, but I'm in a country where such insulation and central heating doesn't exist, and in fact banned completely where I am, but only banned until about November up North when they then get access to coal powered heating, which naturally ruins the rest of the continent with pollution even more.

I'm in a city where you almost never get 5 minutes of silence at night, and barely 5 seconds during the day, and your windows do nothing to block that noise (87% of the time being construction) out.

A simple window is something to be praised from my perspective. As was the smell of freshly dead leaves.

I passed a horse in a field and then I started to recognise the central personality of Leicester. Lots of one-way crossings and traffic lights, weird, old abandoned buildings on something called 'Frog Island' and Canal locks casually controlling the river under the bridge.

I also quickly noticed THREE churches within eyeshot, and decided to drop by one of them to see if there were any cool graves. I wasn't disappointed.

These churches are all hundreds of years old, some dating as far back as the 1100's, so it was again wonderful to see them kept so well. The graves seemed hardly much younger, some of which were completely overgrown and oddly out of place with a car park immediately behind them.

Actually most the ones I read dated around the mid 1800's in this cemetery, but still pretty neat!

The closer I got into town, the more Chinese stuff I started to see. Chinese restaurants seemed to be every 20 paces at one point.

But the city was still distinctly 'Leicester' for a couple of reasons. One being the monstrosity that is the 'highcross' something or other. When I lived there, it was called 'The Shire', but it had since been hugely renovated, extended to over double in size and basically dominates half the city as one giant shopping mall and food court. It's pretty shiny.

And finally I reached what could be considered the city centre. Again, nothing much to see here, but some very strong memories for me anyway.

One thing that tends to stand out is the clock tower, slapped right in the centre of six offshoot streets that make up the whole centre, like a clock spider with 5, franchised legs.

Quick history lesson, the clock was built in 1868, and served as the first traffic island, like a roundabout, in the country after congestion issues arose from six streets of traffic poured into the area. Tramlines used to run around the area making it the most complicated traffic area in Britain at the time.

In a scene seemingly from fantasy, It was also the place where town criers would make declarations and the sort, and would be the focal point of Christmas, maybe even to this day I dunno.

---

---

By the time I made it to the centre I felt great and could have walked all day but time was passing and I had no idea how far my sister was from that point so I had my first Gregg's (an awesome bakery I missed) and headed to the bus station which to my knowledge didn't exist in building form before.

Just before I got to my sister's, I noticed a car, completely overgrown by time, decades uncountable.

It turns out my sister lives in one of a line of old Victorian-era houses, one of which had been abandoned so long ago that the windows in their back garden had been smashed out by overgrowth, and the garden was - I kid you not - completely covered in ivy and foliage at least 3 metres high. Untouched for nobody knows how long, because it was presumably cheaper to abandon than to renovate.

---

---

And that concludes the first 2 hours of my holiday!

Next, I decide on a whim to go to Venice. I mean, why not?

Thanks for reading!