I've been in China for a good 6 days now. Caught a flight from Vancouver to Guangzhou for a little stopover on route to Beijing. China Southern airlines has a shockingly bad entertainment system (i.e. it doesn't work), but the stewardesses were easy on the eye. The last time I flew on a plane with good looking flight attendants was back when I was prepubescent. Cathay Pacific, I believe it was. Continuing with the theme of eye candy, I ended up getting frisked at customs by this pretty girl. I must say, she was rather thorough. I was too tired to even care, and I bet she enjoyed it, considering she was smiling the majority of the time. Funny thing is though, I'm 100% certain I had no metal items in my posession.
Finally arrived in Beijing at around 11.pm. All I wanted was to get my luggage quickly and jump into the next taxi. One by one each person left with their possessions, until I was the only one left. It took me a while to realise that I was in a awkward situation. According to the luggage reception desk, my luggage was still in Guangzhou. In hindsight, it does make sense that I would need to retrieve my check-in luggage at an international airport upon arrival before boarding a domestic flight, but the broad in Vancouver assured me that I was checked in all the way through to Beijing. Ended up having to return to the airport the next day.
I won't get into too much detail about our room here at BLCU, but we live in student dormitory 4 on the second floor. Dorm 4 is one of the international student dorms. Ironically, I met more Americans on my first day here than during my whole San Fran/New York trip. Our room has a funny, musky smell. No doubt it's the pipes and drainage, but it's definitely not as bad as what others have claimed (edit: OK, maybe I was wrong. I think someone next door ate a carcass or something. Having trouble breathing). What I didn't expect was how easily the toilets get blocked. At the time of writing, the current tally for blocking the the toilet stands at Rogers with 5 times, and me with a slightly lower number of 1 (I still think it was a carry-on from the other tenant *ahem*). Rogers initially didn't understand the concept of having to put any toilet paper in the rubbish bin, rather down the bowl (who would?), and as a result, he had to get the maintenance/ janitor dude to come unblock the toilet for him. Twice. By the third or fourth time the thing blocked, we had learned how to use a plunger (shout out to our neighbour for lending us his), but the receptionist(s) was already assuming the toilet was blocked whenever Rogers approached the reception desk. On a related note, be wary of spicy, Szechuan food when it's your first time in China.
On Thursday, we had to sit a placement test to allow class allocation for each student. My results could be described as "high level of speaking/ conversational skills, shittier level of reading and writing skills". I was happy with my final placement as I probably would ahve been rolled in a higher level class. Skill levels range from classes A to F (F being the highest), with several levels in each letter group. I'm not going to lie, I'm closer to the A end on the spectrum, having been placed in high B class. However, I'm definitely learning more difficult content than "yi, er, san, si"...
We hit a expat bar called Tim's Texas Bar-BQ to watch the All Blacks vs. Tonga game. For the unacquainted, the All Blacks are the New Zealand national rugby team who are competing at the 2011 Rugby World Cup which happens to be in New Zealand this time round. It only took us two and a half hours to commute from BLCU to our destination. Someone suggested that a taxi would be quicker than taking 3 trains. Made sense at the time. However, the fact that it took us nearly half an hour to wave down a taxi in the first place should have given us a massive hint framed in neon lights that what we were doing was stupid. We completely forgot that it happened to be the weekend of China's mid-autumn festival. This translates to a shit load of cars on the road. We were literally moving at one block every 5-10 minutes at one point. Luckily for us, the broadcast at Tim's was delayed by half an hour, so we managed to catch half of the second half. Sadly, this was apparently the boring portion of the game, as I later discovered on the sports news online. Beer wasn't exactly cheap at this place either, with a Tiger costing around 30RMB, which is probably what we would pay back home at a bar. Overall, though, we had a good time. Especially when we got our hands on a endless supply of Yanjing beer....
Food is comparatively cheap over here, but prices do vary. In our student cafeteria, a meal costs on average around 8-10RMB, which is nothing when you consider that you are essentially paying $2NZ for something that would cost $10 back home. Then we have your 500RMB roast duck dinners. The place we went to, Dadong Roast Duck Restaurant (or something) is highly recommended in Steve's travel guide. Since Beijing Roast Duck is a must eat while in Beijing, we decided to give this place a try. The wait time to be seated was around half an hour and getting the food was another half an hour, but it was good duck, I must say. Just to clarify, the duck itself didn't cost 500RMB, we did order other stuff. Again, this is cheap as chips (not literally) considering the type of meal we got, but I don't intend on spending the equivalent of $100NZ on every meal. Looking forward to the places that the locals prefer, where the duck is apparently even better.
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| I wonder what they do with the rest of the duck |
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DJ
PS: will also try to post stuff about NY/Canada at a later date....
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