After endless years of teachers, revision and exams, the last thing I could contemplate straight after A levels was three more years of timetabled self-improvement.

I had a place at university to study architecture, but convinced myself that the best preparation for this was to see as much of the world as possible, under the pretence that exotic cultural experience may inform my work. That’s how I sold it to Ucas.

A long summer of screwing seats to legs in a furniture shop in Leeds funded my way to Washington DC, where I spent three months as an intern in the National Building Museum. Thrown straight in at the deep end, I was teaching hands-on urban design classes for pre-school kids — think of Blue Peter meeting town planning, with plenty of loo roll-chimney factories and cereal packet skyscrapers.

While I enthused about zoning, the kids seemed more interested in my quaint English accent, asking if we had television in our thatched cottage idyll. I had no choice but to lead them astray and concoct elaborate lies.

I had always imagined the American capital as a kind of political Disneyland, a world of manicured lawns, suits and classical monuments. But the TV version belies the thriving underworld of eager interns scuttling between state departments by day, and between warehouse art shows and grimy bars by night.

With these student swarms comes an incredibly refined infrastructure, including the great Washington Intern Student Housing association, which housed me two blocks from Capitol Hill and provided a network of friends, who in turn provided routes to champagne receptions and political intrigues.

Spring found me on the other side of the world, teaching English at a middle school in Beijing with i-to-i, the gap-year company. The classes comprised 40 to 50 students dressed in gleaming white tracksuits with blue and red flashes, the school giving the impression of an Olympic training academy. They had the discipline to match, with choreographed exercises and flag-raising at dawn, lessons beginning at 7am and an optional “English Corner” after school.

In return for the long hours, we were showered with hospitality, housed in luxury apartments, assigned minders whenever we left the school and given all kinds of gifts. We forged close friendships, being invited back to students’ homes in the holidays and taken out to bars by some of our own age. Four years on, I am still in touch with many and have been back to visit.

My time in China was cut short by the Sars crisis. After watching an increasing number of ambulances and spending a few surreal days teaching in a surgical mask, we received a fax from the embassy and I escaped to Bangkok for a heady three-month mix of temples and rice fields, beaches and Buddhas.

From the land of eternal smiles, I landed in the Japanese mega-city of Fukuoka and quickly left for Kunimi, a rural village where I was to embark on a “never-ending international workcamp exchange”, volunteering at a welfare centre for the elderly. Activities included cleaning the river,helping to run a national youth football tournament.

Organised by several international groups (UNA Exchange at this end), the workcamps give a thorough programme of cultural exchange; by the end I was competent in flower arranging, calligraphy and tea ceremony, all the things that make for a good Japanese wife.

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