The Hobbit Hold

The blog got its name from “The Hobbit”. I, like Bilbo Baggins, feel like all the years I have spent in China have changed my life forever. Though I’ve been enjoying every moment spent in this land, I’m starting to feel that this great adventure of mine is coming to an end and the time has come for me to move back to a familiar place that I can call home.

Why I’ve decided to start a blog at this time, except for the obvious reason of sharing my experience of living and working in a foreign culture, is that deep inside I am afraid of repatriation. In fact, I’ve already experienced going back home after spending a year in China, and it wasn’t easy. I was so excited to go back after a  year of study abroad, thinking that I would just be able to slip back into the old shoes and that everything would be as it used to be… boy,  was I wrong!

I am usually a very optimistic person who tends to spread positive energy, but at this point, I got into a depression which even caused the need for two small surgeries.  It all lasted until I consciously decided to put a stop to it. I enrolled to study MBA and took up dancing. That helped to get my mind off of the state I was in, but I was working on finding another opportunity to return to China.

 Now that I am going back home for the second time, I don’t want to make the same mistake I did the first time.  I intend to prepare for it in advance, have a plan, and start something new that will excite me and will help occupy my brain during the painful transition period.

 I decided to start this blog just at the onset of the Corona virus outbreak in China. Though I had a definite date when to leave China, the fact that the virus is spreading rapidly throughout the world makes everything uncertain.

What’s The Blog About:

In this blog you can learn about the nuances of living abroad, starting a business in China as an expat, as well as study abroad, traveling, life in China, and most importantly all the useful things I’ve learnt from Chinese people that enrich my everyday life.

What makes this expat blog different from other expat blogs, is that it is written by someone who has lived in this country for 12 years, and has, therefore, gained a profound understanding of the Chinese culture. I was lucky to have had the opportunity to come to China as a student which helped me to better immerse in the culture and avoid living in “the expat bubble.”

About Me

I used to be an introvert, and a totally different person when I came to China. After all the challenges one can face when living in a foreign country (especially China), I started to like challenges and got even very ambitious somewhere in the process.

One thing that never changed though is my adventurous spirit. In my 20s I expressed my love of adventures through traveling, especially backpacking, now in my 30s it is through entrepreneurship. 

                                                                 The Hubby

While at my first job in China, I met Vali, the love of my life. The story of how we met is a fun and unforgettable one.

I was an HR in a travel company in charge of recruiting and interviewing candidates. I could hardly find screening CVs on a daily basis exciting…. until I received his. The moment I opened it and saw his photo, I knew it… this was “the prince” I’d been waiting for my whole life.

He had quite an outstanding CV; the colleague from the department he was applying to and I were so impressed. Later that day, as he sent in the test required for the position, and I attempted to forward it to my colleague, I subconsciously pressed the “wrong” button. I wanted to let my colleague know that this is the email “we’ve been waiting” and asked her to hurry up with checking it so we can arrange an interview.

And then, imagine my disappointment when I find out that instead of “forward” I’ve clicked the “reply” button, which meant that he got my email first and found out about my little secret. He called the next day and ask to speak to HR about the email. I lied to him that it was the assistant who sent it by mistake.

He got on board surprisingly quick and I tried very hard to pretend that I wasn’t the person who sent that email. It lasted for few months until it became impossible to hide.

In the events that followed, the travel company had to close, we changed work environments couple times before we decided to start our own businesses venture. Later we got married in Hong Kong.

He has been amazingly supportive and we love each other very much. When we are together we are like water and fire in literally every aspect of life. I am ambitious, he is a very creative person with many talents, who just wants to be left in peace to draw.

However, there is something that keeps us together and it is exactly our love of adventure. An artist and a woman with a sense for business, we joined forces to become business partners, which resulted in creating our first business venture, a cartoon studio that we named “ALBA”.

Our Mission: “Life isn’t fun without A Little Bit Apparel”

 ALBA is an acronym for A Little Bit Apparel, as we like to say “Life isn’t fun without A Little Bit Apparel”, in Chinese “无冒险不人生“.  Monthy-Python fans might catch the reference. No one that ever achieved greatness has ever done so without taking the risk needed to be great.  Many people never reach their potential for happiness and greatness because they’re too afraid to make the leap of faith to do what they love.

Mort: A Mascot on a Mission:

What came out of ALBA was the Mort Comic series. Mort is the unlikely but highly appropriate mascot for ALBA. He is a cute version of the traditional European personification of Death.

In his way Mort represents “adventure”, and through him we strived to raise awareness of the need to cultivate a risk-taking mentality, seizing the day, and daring to dream the impossible.

As Vali would say, Mort is a memento mori. The purpose behind his creation was to make people less afraid of death and remind them of the purpose of life. Mort shows us that death isn’t something we should be so afraid of. In fact, there is something even scarier than death, and that is life not lived to its fullest. Too many people are so afraid to die that they forget to “live”. Mort says that we are not given our lives to make them last forever. We don’t need to live forever, we just have to “live”.

Watch the Mort animatic!