The massive clock in the picture above isn't my house - that's Big Ben. At least, the bell inside is called Big Ben. The outer shell doesn't really have a name but it does look nice. Still it's not where I live but it's a picture that best sums up the country where I live, the country I am currently in, and the country I returned to after our year's adventure in China.

We had to change rooms for our last night in Hong Kong, because of an unspecified problem with some pipes that was never really explained to us. The man who owned the guesthouse just kept saying "sorry" and "pipes", so we didn't push him too hard. We moved rooms and ate out and readied ourselves for the hideous journey we'd be taking home that very next day - from Chungking Mansions to the airport, from Hong Kong to Doha, and finally from Doha to London.

Hong Kong airport is enormous and looks a lot like Beijing airport. It's a similar sort of size and obviously there's the passengers and planes that are a popular staple of any airport. In many respects all airports are alike really because they all have to accomodate flights in and out, but I liked the airport. It was airy and quite breezy, and there was WiFi freely available all over the place. It was quite different to Beijing airport because there was a large union protest happening in the gate where we were waiting, concerning an airline that had made some staff redundant. Instead of doing the usual Chinese thing of crushing any dissidence without mercy, the Hong Kong security just did what the security would do in the UK, or any other civilised country (aside from the USA, obviously) - they let the protest continue and just kept an eye on things.

Katy really liked it because when I went to find a bag of crisps in the shop - really just an excuse to play with the iPhone I'd spyed in the Apple shop nearby - the protesters began to chant and march down the aisle in which we were waiting, and they actually stopped next to her for a bit, so Katy was sat in the middle, with our luggage, trying to look interested while these protesters chanted and shouted around her in Chinese. I'm sure it looked hilarious.

We flew with Qatar airlines which was cool because everything had Arabic script all over it. Even the exit and toilet signs, the subtitles on the in-flight entertainment system, and the air stewardesses' name badges all had Arabic script. It's just nice to see for someone who has never been anywhere near anywhere in the Middle East before. It's just another culture to see, if only for a couple of hours. We landed in Doha and immediately any skin we had showing was covering in a tight constricting humidity, condusive to the desert that was surrounding us. It was 10pm at night when we landed and a stonking 35 degrees celsius, the kind of temperature that takes your breath away when we first expose yourself to it, especially at 10pm at night. It was strange to have that much heat with such little light, but we didn't have to be in it that long because the little shuttle bus picked us up and took us to the cool shiny air conditioned airport proper.

We sat and people watched for a while in Doha, perched on our little bench in an area in which we thought our gate might be. It turned out in the end that we weren't too far from out gate and so we queued with the people who'd be coming to England with us. Soon we were on the plane and, an uncomfortable sleep later, we were landing at home. My parents picked us up after the passport showing and the luggage grabbing, and just a few hours later I was sitting at home, on our new corner sofa, ears still buzzing from a year in noisy China.

In the week I've been home I've been struggling to readjust to life in normality again. China fades away a little more each day and is beginning to feel like a really strange dream, a dream that lasted a little more than a year. It's like someone took me and froze me for a year, while everyone else aged and grew around me. Babies are bigger than they were before, as are beards and bellies. I've been down the pub with my friends - friends that you don't realise you really did miss until you see them again - and I've been redisovering the banal joy of just sitting on a bus without a man's crotch in my face. Television I can understand. Unsweetened bacon on unsweetend bread. Not being shouted at by a mental woman selling washing powder in the supermarket. Almost never smelling something urinating, defecating, or dying in the street next to me. No babies or children's willies. I'll miss China, but I missed home more.

Xie xie and zai jian! Rob