One Month On...

Yesterday was officially one month since I arrived in Beijing. My how the time has flown! And yet, I feel so settled here already. I put that down to the fact that I already have an amazing group of friends, great housemates and have been so busy and having too much fun since I arrived. I started work last week so am starting to develop some semblance of a routine. I start chinese classes tomorrow too! Two nights a week I'll be having a two hour class with my housemate, H, two-on-one with a teacher at a school not too far from here. Riding distance in fact! And now that I own an awesome bike (complete with basket and bell) it's perfect. I must say I'm not particularly looking forward to getting back into study mode, especially given it will be on top of work 9-5, but am looking forward to learning a little bit more chinese. It will definitely make getting around a lot easier.

In other news... well, I've honestly left writing on here too long, too much has happened in that time i don't know where to start! Some interesting moments I'll quickly summarise - because it's late and I have to go to work tomorrow morning!

1. We got locked into our apartment. Three times. Each time we had to call our real estate agent to help us get out. One time we actually had to throw the key out of our fifth floor window at 7am (after having been locked in all night) so that someone could go and unlock the door from the outside. Talk about a fire hazard! Typical china though. Not one of us had any difficulty getting our chinese colleagues to believe it. I just got a smile and a knowing nod. Like it happens all the time.

2. I went to the Great Wall Marathon. Just to watch, fortunately. But literally, it was a marathon along the great wall of china. A friend of H's came up from Hong Kong to run the half-marathon so we went out for the day to watch them run. Probably the toughest marathon you can imagine, those hills were intense!

3. Food. Oh the places we've been in two weeks! Peking Duck, Hot Pot, the list goes on, and my goodness have they all been amazing!

4. Bought train tickets for the long weekend. Next weekend, in fact. In China they have a weird system where train tickets go on sale 10 days prior to the date you want to travel. So to buy our tickets to Qingdao I went to the main train station with Z after work on the day. The place was ginormous. And all in chinese of course. We eventually found the ticket hall where you buy tickets and it was filled with people. A room the size of a gymnasium, all in lines to different counters with screens displaying who knows what in different chinese characters above them. After standing in a few different lines, we eventually discovered that there was a line that 'foreigners' could stand in where the attendant would speak english. We battled attempted queue jumpers (they love to target the dumb foreigners, apparently they think we think they all look the same so won't notice and extra person in front of us?), the ticket lady trying to rip us off, but we came away with our tickets. Well, our outward bound tickets anyway. The return leg tickets didn't go on sale for another two days. When we did return two days later, we found that all the monday afternoon tickets had sold out already. Our only option was the slow train, overnight, in a hard seat. (That's cattle class to the max...) So think of me next monday night while I spend 10 hours sitting in a hard seat trying to get some sleep before arriving back in Beijing at 6am just in time to head to work at 9!

5. Bought a bike! I already mentioned that, but it's also worth noting that Z, H and I went to buy a bike together and came home with matching bikes, all in different colours. Very tacky, but they are fun to get around the neighbourhood on :)

6. Nearly got locked inside the forbidden city overnight. We got lost trying to find a nearby bar where we were meeting some people. After walking for what seemed like forever, our feet were sore so we hopped in a cab hoping the driver would know where the elusive 'What? Bar' was. After some confusing and utterly hopeless conversation (where he talked in chinese to us, and we talked back in English, neither of us understanding a word each other said), he dropped us off just inside some big official gate where we jumped out, walked through ever hopeful he knew more than he was letting on, but found that we were actually inside the forbidden city, and that it had actually closed. When we reached the front gate, we were lucky to find one door slightly ajar and made our way out - much to the surprise of the guards on the other side who quickly started yelling something in Chinese and chasing us away!

There are plenty more stories to tell, however I'm too tired! Will try not to leave it too long before my next post. Have definitely come to realise that makes writing anything infinitely harder!

We Found an Apartment!

The search is over, H, Z, and I have found an apartment, and we love it!!

After many a strained phone call to various real estate agents in our best chinglish, and seeing many apartment's that weren't quite right, we managed to be shown a place we instantly felt would be our new home. It's in the Hutong neighbourhood we love, it's an 8 minute walk to the subway and has (most of the) western features we felt we needed (like an actual toilet you can sit on), but still lacking some, like an oven, which unfortunately seems unavoidable. We went to see it for the second time today, and put a deposit down (equivalent to bond). We looked over the lease contract, which is written in chinese and english, and negotiated all the details in english/chinese - who knew the lonely planet phrasebook would come in handy negotiating a lease? It took us quite a while, as each question had to be asked about 5 times, in 5 different ways before it was understood, but we got there in the end. We think.

After handing over a month's worth of rent as a bond, we were given a piece of paper on which one sentence was hand-written in chinese. A receipt - we were told. I guess that works.... but who know's what it actually says!

Another interesting thing we discovered about a chinese lease (after pouring over the details) is that in the case of a dispute, the chinese version of the text (which none of us can obviously read) will take legal precedence over the english. Riight. Glad we bothered then! Who know's what that part says!!

Anyway, we can move in on Sunday night. Yippee!! Above are a couple of pictures we took a few days ago in the general neighbourhood where our new apartment is located. Not very good quality as i took them on my phone, but better than nothing. Pretty eh? Will take and post some pictures of the apartment and the surrounds soon.

A x

Tourist for (Half) a Day

On Tuesday, we had a break from our language and orientation schedule to take an afternoon to go and see some of the sights around Beijing. Stephen (his English name), a student at nearby Peking University, offered to take some of us to the Forbidden City, and Mel and I took him up on the offer. Fortunately for us, the pollution seemed to lift for the afternoon, as you can see in the pictures below where blue sky is actually visible! (This has been the one and only time it's happened since I arrived).

First Impressions

I made it to China, I hope you are all pleased to hear :)

I had a window seat on the last leg of the trip and was looking out the window as we made our descent into Beijing. I thought at one stage that we were descending through the clouds, but as we got lower and lower i started to doubt it was clouds at all... it seemed to have a weird orange tinge to it, and none of the changing densities you notice moving through cloud banks. FInally it dawned on me that it was in fact pollution that we were flying through. Yuck. (I later learned that the sand storm may also have contributed). It was like a really thick mist. To give you an idea of how bad it was: I couldn't see the ground until about 10 seconds before we landed when i first spied a tree through the smog. As we taxied I could barely see the terminal, let alone any buildings beyond the airport. It was just a dirty white spreading off into the distance.

Fortunately none of us had any trouble getting through immigration when we arrived, despite the trouble we'd had getting our visas. Once we'd picked up our bags we made our way to our temporary accommodation in the north west of Beijing at the Chinese Language and Culture University.

After a quick nap (on my bed, which I swear is actually a plank of wood with a bed sheet over the top), and a brief moment of "Oh my god what was I thinking moving to China??" (which fortunately passed relatively quickly), we headed to lunch where we were treated to the most amazing chinese feast! The food was all from the Xinjiang province over near Afghanistan - amazing! I know i came to china for a reason - the food!! haha.

After lunch, while walking back to our hotel, I noticed how sore my eyes and throat had become - they're killing me! Half a day in Beijing and the pollution is already starting to piss me off. Not to mention the fact that despite it being a 'sunny day' in beijing, I can't see the sky! The sun shines down, i put on my sunglasses because of the glare, look up and all I see is grey. Very bizarre.

More later.

x