JOE

Joe is from Beverley, a historic market town in East Yorkshire, in the northeast of England. After discovering a love of languages at a young age, he went on to study Chinese and French at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with a first class degree and distinction in both spoken languages.

After graduating, Joe travelled to Taiwan on a British government scholarship, where he spent six months studying traditional Chinese at National Cheng Kung University in sunny Tainan. Before long, however, the aromatic allure of China’s southwestern Sichuan province was too strong, and he soon found himself in the region’s capital, Chengdu. There he worked for several months bringing European and North American students to the city to participate in internships, with an aim to promote business links between China and Europe. It was also during this time that he fell in love with the numbing taste of Sichuan peppercorn, and he hasn’t looked back since.

Joe has now returned to Edinburgh, and in his spare time enjoys walking Edinburgh’s many hills, kickboxing, reading about Daoism and cooking Chinese food for his friends (in particular, dandan noodles!).