But instead of jumping into action and take the next plane to a remote island or the deep Amazonian jungle, we opted for a ”soft-landing”.
Ok, it wasn’t fully a choice, but it turned out to be a good thing. Yang Ke still had an exam end of April she needed to study for, and I also could time my next exam to the same period. We therefore decided to spend our first four weeks with Yang Ke’s parents in Wuxi, China, studying while spending time with the family and enjoy the pleasant spring weather.
After the last weeks in Singapore were pretty rush in getting everything prepared, saying good-bye to all our nice friends and colleagues, arranging visas and clearing our apartment, we didn’t really have a lot of time to think about the travel itself, apart from the vague plan to fly to Peru and sometime later continue to Chile (after we had to change our initial plan last-minute – Yang Ke can tell you more
Sitting then in the plane to Wuxi after everything went pretty smooth, we finally released a huge sigh of relief, looking forward to a relaxing study-time, with enough time to sort out any remaining to-dos and do a bit of travel planning and reading.

And we had a very pleasant time indeed. Yang Ke’s parents took great care of us, not only with delicious and healthy home-cooked food but her mum had also scouted everything in advance for us, from the best study places to organizing us a monthly gym-membership.

We developed somewhat of a daily routine, containing with some variations a morning visit to the neighbouring hill + park combined with a Tai Chi session or walk up to the summit (1668 stairs in total!), some reading in the morning, lunch at home, a swim in the gym in the early afternoon, study-session in the afternoon/evening, dinner outside.

We had a few cooling days with some crazy temperature changes, but mostly very nice spring weather with all trees in full blossom

Coming down the mountain from another side comes with the comfort of a cable-car and nice views on a pagoda and Wuxi’s skyline.

We spend our last week in Shanghai where we both had our exam. As mine was the style of a project, which I had four days to prepare, we settled-in in a nice hotel, which became my study-place for the whole four days. Initially I didn’t plan to venture out much, as the exam was supposed to be very time-intense, but after the first day I felt quite comfortable and started to slot-in more breaks and get more sun-exposure. Discovered that our hotel actually had a great location, just next to a huge park 中山公园 , which was perfect for having a walk but also for admiring all the activities of the locals, from calligraphy painters over kite-flyers to Tai Chi groups and all kind of other dance groups.
Despite so much activity it never felt too crowded and I found myself a quiet spot to do my own Tai Chi session. After my first session I immediately got into a chat* with some older locals who took the time to give me advice and do a long Tai Chi session together.
The surroundings of our hotel also had a few nice streets and restaurants to explore, which made for nice-breaks. I think overall I enjoyed the stay so much that I became very motivated for my exam

And then our stay already came to an end, much too quickly. After good-byes in Wuxi, we headed back again to Shanghai to catch our flight to Peru, with stopover in Toronto.

[* whenever I refer to “chat with locals” this usually implies understanding of at most half of the conversation and includes a lot of guessing, hand-signs and misunderstandings]