Time travels

For the past three days I've been waking up at either 5 or 6am. On Monday I had to get up early to catch a train to Manchester to apply for my visa for China (stupidly my phone broke in the middle of the night so I didn't have an alarm wake me up and had to rush to get ready and get bus to train station, but thankfully I made it on time!). One of my brothers lives in Manchester so he met me at the station and took me to the Visa office, I hadn't printed my passport photos on the right paper so had to retake them but other than that everything went smoothly and I was set to pick it up on Wednesday.

Because of the early start I hadn't had any breakfast but after walking around the Arndale, my brother took me to an American diner for breakfast/lunch. They had really cool interior with different state number planes stuck to the wall and a bar full of mirrors (and drinks). The menu was pretty cool too, they had a 21 pancake stack challenge and also lots of different flavour chips. We decided to order a stack of pancakes to share and garlic parmesan skinny fries with bacon!

After my trip to Manchester I went home and did pretty much nothing! But I was able to breathe a sigh of relief as my visa was finally being processed after the information pack containing my offer letter needed for my visa application was over a month late.

Tuesday was another early morning and it was so totally worth it. I got up at 5am to go on a beach ride! This was my first ever beach ride and it was so much fun, we went out for two hours starting at 8:30 so the beach was totally empty. It was so much fun galloping along the beach and all the horses were so well behaved, I had a lovely mare called Meg!

Again, up at 6am to go to Manchester to pick up my visa on Wednesday morning. Within half an hour of arriving I had collected my visa and now here I am writing this blog waiting for my train back to Notts.

Now that my visa has finally been sorted I can actually start getting excited about going. Loads of people when I say I'm studying in China next year always ask, "are you excited?", my standard response is, I don't know. Simply because there's been so much to sort out and some things have been hassle to organise that it's been hard to get excited when there was a big to-do list. The only things I have left now are flights and travel insurance and I'll be fully set for a year full of adventures! I would also say to then that, because there was a lot to do beforehand, and I was going to Spain first, I was more excited for Spain and I know what to expect with Spain, which adds to the excitement. Now I can be excited for both, and excited for what China has to offer.

I already have big plans for traveling, there's so many places I want to go and even though it's over two months away, my time in Spain (starting on Sunday) is going to fly by so fast!

If you have been to China before or South-East Asia, I'd love to hear your stories and experiences and any places you recommend me to visit!

*UPDATE* Spent Wednesday night celebrating in style with the best girls (equestrian crew of course!). We had our awards night...I didn't win sassiest rider, *sobs*, it's ok the girl that did 100% deserved it!

Had some interesting cocktails such as the one above, named Pornstar martini, which came with a shot of champagne. It was really nice, it was passion fruit flavour and I thought it tasted quite strong too haha!

We all had a long and eventful night. I had woken up at 6am and went to sleep at 6:30 on Thursday morning, so had been up for 24hrs!