Hey guys!

I’m really sorry for the several month long hiatus! If you’ve been following me via facebook or twitter, I recently explained my reasoning for this. If not, I’ll tell you briefly about it now. Since the beginning of September, I’ve been focusing on making a portfolio in order to apply for an animation program in Denmark. I’ve been working relentlessly and avoiding social life, as there are only 25 students that get in, out of approximately 500. At first, I felt I had lots of time to come up with great work, so I could simultaneously continue working on Septembuary and update as usual. But, as the months crept on, the volume of work was there, but the quality was not up to my standards. So as a result, I decided to dedicate the last few months before the deadline entirely to the portfolio and pause on Septembuary. The deadline is in a week, and I’m about 99% done, I am finally back from the dead, and am resuming regular bi-monthly updates as of this comic strip! I hope you can understand my absence, and I just wanted to share my work with you if you want to take a look at the portfolio. You can find it here: http://yuliyashvets.blogspot.dk/

As for the strip, I really hope I’m not the only person who experiences this feeling every time I leave China. Though there are somewhere between 300-500 thousand expats (according to some source I can’t recall now) in China, being spread out among 1.4 billion people is still a thin spread, so often, foreigners get stared at and looked at like celebrities, or aliens, depending how you interpret their looks. Though in my town, there are quite a few foreigners, so people don’t nearly care about us as much, in my previous little town of Huangyan, I was a big novelty, so the stares got to you quite fast. However, having recently been to both Europe and Canada, I had this big lump in my throat on how I was no longer fascinating to look at, and I felt incredible happiness being back at Guangzhou airport, and once again hear the whispers and surprised looks of local people. Anyone else feel this way when you travel, or am I a complete self indulgent egotist?