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Sorry for the lateness of this blog but we've only just got internet out here and the schools Wi-Fi is temperamental to say the least. I'll start off by saying that if you haven't already looked there's a mass of pictures in the photo album section on this here blog which will give you a better idea of what I've been up to for the past couple of weeks.
Now onto the main event, my first blog entry:
This is gonna be a big one...
My journey started with a train journey down to London Kings cross after having said an emotional goodbye to family and friends. Upon arriving at Kings cross I had to catch the tube to Heathrow airport and in doing so met one of my fellow volunteers, Rosie, who happened to be staying in the same province as Jacob and myself, just under an hour away. We travelled together to terminal three, with the both of us lugging around a massive suitcase and carry-on luggage which was full to the brim. Upon arriving at Heathrow airport we met up with another volunteer, Anya, who is Rosie's project partner and proceeded to check our bags in. As my parents will know this was a slightly worrying prospect as I knew that my suitcase was over the 20kg limit by roughly 4kg so was dreading having to dish out some more money to get my luggage on board. However it would appear that luck was on my side as the women behind the desk barely looked at the weight of the case and quickly waved me through. It was at this point that I met up with Jacob who had already checked in and was waiting for me by security. We continued on through the security gate and waited by the screens eagerly awaiting the little yellow number that would indicate our departure gate. During the wait we eventually amassed more and more members of our china group until eventually we had everybody, as the last of our group arrived the gate number was revealed and suddenly it all became very real, we were going to China and wouldn't be back in England for another year.
So there we were, my project partner and I ready to go to china, as teachers, for a full 12 months!
After a long flight to Hong Kong and then another from Hong Kong to Beijing (approximately 20 hours travelling in total) we arrived in Beijing to be greeted by our country rep Mike Hawkings who got us all onto a coach which would take us to a hostel we would be staying in for the next five days. During the journey mike gave us all a brief on what we would be doing during the orientation in Beijing along with our Chinese text book which we would be using for our language course. Upon arriving at the hostel we set our bags off in our rooms (I was sharing a room with a French guy and a German named Hunter who was studying in china) and were promptly whisked off to have dinner at a local restaurant despite the fact that most of us wanted nothing more than to just go to bed.
Over the next few days we were taken out on various excursions by Mike to help us get a feel of Beijing and the Chinese way of life. The first big lesson that most of the volunteers learnt was how to cross a road, luckily I knew what to expect because of my visits to Vietnam. For those of you who don't know what I'm on about let me summarise the rules for you: When you approach a road, by all means look both ways but note that you will most likely lose confidence in your ability to cross a road safely and be reluctant to step any further, as the traffic light system is more of a guide line in China. Universally red means stop but here it's more of a 'stop if you want to' system and of course green means go, so as you can imagine you always have a constant stream of bikes, cars, scooters and the occasional lorry driving through a red light. Your best bet when crossing a road here is to simply step out and walk and the cars and scooters will move around you. A useful tip given to us by Mike was to find a local crossing the road and put them between you and the oncoming traffic as that way the local will be able to stop the cars in their usual manner (shouting and Pointing) allowing you to cross safely to the other side.
Our first excursion was to the CEAIE (china education thingy...) for a quick presentation about china, followed by Lunch at their headquarters. The presentation was interesting and they showed a quick video from the school that Jacob and myself would be going to, which was fun as we got to see the school and its surroundings for the first time. As for the lunch, most of it was amazing but there were two things which for one, I didn't know what they were and two, they tasted disgusting. After Lunch we headed to Tian'anmen square to have a look around and also for our first challenge: to get back to the hostel all by ourselves. The square was cool and provided lots of great photo opportunities and obviously had a lot of history surrounding it. The challenge was also interesting as we got to experience our first taste of the underground system in Beijing, surprisingly it was better than the tube system in London, it was cleaner and had air-conditioning and also had a mass of TV screens advertising various products, one of which looked suspiciously like a mail order bride service. Luckily we all made it back and as a reward were thrown a barbecue by Mike.
The next day we went to the great wall, this was probably my favourite of all the excursions because I'd always wanted to go visit the wall and now there I was. The climb up to the wall was one that I would rather not repeat, the stairs! My word there were so many, we were all just slowly making our way up stopping at every opportunity to take a break whilst being passed by various Chinese people who'd barely broke a sweat. Eventually we made it to the wall and were so relieved that we stopped for about 10 minutes just to catch a break and take some pictures. We then decided to walk a bit further on and were horrified to see that the wall had even more stairs on it and in order for us to get to the best photo spots we had to climb them! This led to us all becoming incredibly thirsty despite being given a 2 litre bottle in the morning, and as a result we had to stop at every guard tower along the way to buy more water (the Chinese are a clever people). To get down from the wall we had the choice of either walking back down or taking a toboggan, so naturally the majority of us decided to toboggan, I mean how many people can say that they have tobogganed down the side of the Great Wall of China! The evening was spent eating roast duck at the aptly named restaurant 'Beijing Roast Duck'.
Another excursion that we did was going to Nanluoguxiang where there was a lovely market full of chinglish signs and writing, not to mention Chipsters (Chinese Hipsters). We bought a variety of different objects, I bought a little leather book for 35 yuan and Stephen bought an innocent Childs game, purely because in its name it made reference to a Cockerel (just short of the last few letters). I will be creating a photo album full of all the various Chinglish that Jacob and I find during our travels so keep an eye out for that if you want a good laugh!
On Monday 26th August we set off to Beijing Number 50 Middle School to meet our Chinese teacher for the week as well as our host partners. My host partner was a 15 year old boy named Zhai whose English was good but not as good as his written English, this it seems is very common in china as lots of people can write English beautifully but have trouble speaking it. After having met our 'China buddies' we were given a school lunch which was honestly the nicest meal I've ever eaten in any school. Ever. Following our lovely lunch we were taken to an environment talk at Beijing university, it took us 2 and a half hours to get to the university via various tubes and buses and to add to that we had to wait 30 minutes to go through security just to get into the campus grounds. This was then followed by a 30 minute walk to a stone boat where we all sat and listened to a friend of Mikes talk about the environment for 20 minutes. I can't for the life of me begin to tell you the contents of the talk because I was just so tired and sweaty from the journey to get there that I just sat there in a daze like the rest of the group, including the Chinese students. This was the only disappointing day of the entire orientation period and even Mike admitted that it was probably not worth the three and a half hour journey for the sake of a 20 minute talk. The evening was spent with the host families; mine were lovely and very helpful, constantly asking me if I wanted anything to make my stay more comfortable. They also wanted to have lots of pictures with me and wanted to know everything about England and my family, more specifically how many brothers and sisters I had. When I told them I had three brothers they stared at me open mouthed in shock. This is obviously because in china, due to the one child policy you are only allowed one child, so to meet someone who has three siblings is very rare.
The next day we started by having a Chinese lesson in the morning which was very fun and helpful as it enabled us to give basic introductions and to learn the number system, which is fairly easy actually. We were then taken to the Forbidden City for a guided tour by one of Mike's friends, Luke. This excursion was fantastic, the architecture was amazing and full of colour and the history of the place as provided by Luke was very interesting. One of my favourite facts was that the various staircases leading up to the throne rooms were shaped to look like the Chinese character for emperor. There was however one thing that annoyed me, and that was that the Chinese thought it a good idea to put basketball courts inside the Forbidden City which to me just ruined the atmosphere of the place, could you imagine if someone put a basketball court by the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt? Despite the basketball courts the Forbidden City is a beautiful place and well worth a visit.
Following the previous days guidelines the morning was spent having Chinese lessons at the school, followed by a beautiful lunch provided by the school. In the afternoon we were taken to 798 Art district by our Chinese teacher. It took us about an hour to get there by taking various buses and tubes but it was well worth it in the end. Upon arrival we were given a brief talk by Mike who was accompanying us there just to outline the times we would be meeting up. We were then left to wonder the district by ourselves and view the many different art exhibitions most of which were modern art and interesting to say the least... one of the exhibitions was a in a massive white building and had 5 'art' pieces in there, including the wheels from a plane, an incredibly long sock hanging from the ceiling with a plastic foot at the bottom and a glass box containing used cigarettes (yes that was actually a piece of art, not just a place for people to discard there finished cigarettes). Despite some of the exhibitions being rather strange the majority were very good and made for a good day out. We also found a variety of shops which were popular with everybody, I bought a lovely leather book which I have used as a scrap book to keep all of my tickets etc in and we also found a match stick gun which used match sticks to make a loud bang and smoke effect, this was demonstrated to us by the shop staff when he accidently fired it on his way out of the shop (to a safe place) right in front of a group of Chinese woman who promptly shouted "you crazy" at him. After we had been round the district we returned to Mike and our Chinese teacher (Miss Cao) to go to a tea tasting session nearby. The tea tasting was very nice and we were given proper instruction on how to drink tea in the traditional Chinese manner. 1) Grip the cup with your thumb, index and middle finger in a dragon claw formation. 2) Bring the cup up to your nose and smell the tea. 3) Sip the tea once, pause, twice, pause and finish. Note that the tea cups here are a lot smaller than back home and most people don't drink tea this way anymore. Following the tea tasting we were given a goody bag full of various teas and were then allowed to go home with china buddies. It took me 3 hours to get back to my Host families house and by the time I got there it was about 10 o'clock at night and we hadn't eaten anything since 12:00 so were both incredibly hungry. Luckily Zhai's mum had cooked us a miniature banquette consisting of rice, noodles, asparagus, egg, broccoli and much, much more.
The following afternoon we were taken to the Heavenly temples and Hongqiao Pearl Market. The Heavenly temples were beautiful and had lots of interesting history about them. They also had an echo wall were you were supposed to be able to create an echo just by taking in the direction of the wall, unfortunately no one in our group was able to get the wall to work despite a few peoples persistent shouts of "this is Sparta!". After the temples we went to the pearl market where people tried their hands at haggling, some people succeeded where others, in the eyes of the Chinese failed miserably. After the market we then went home with our host partners, for our last night. On the way back my partner asked me if I would like to try a Chinese pizza tonight at a restaurant he knew, so I assuming it would be an interesting experience said yes. We arrived at the 'Chinese pizza' restaurant within half an hour and to my dismay the sign outside the restaurant read 'Pizza hut', yes that's right I'd been taken to Pizza hut under the impression that I would be eating something Chinese. Alas my partner looked pleased with himself so I said nothing and we ate a very traditional Chinese Deep Dish Meat Feast Pizza.
Friday 30th August. This was a day to remember. We arrived at the school with all of our luggage because our host families had told us to do so, despite the fact that we wouldn't be leaving for our projects until the following day. It was at this point that some people started to question whether we were in fact leaving today instead of tomorrow and sure enough mike rang ahead saying he was on his way to explain everything and that he had gotten the dates wrong, we were in fact leaving on the Friday not the Saturday. This unfortunately meant that some people had already missed their trains to their projects and that my train would be leaving in 2 hours. When Mike arrived he was very apologetic and hurried the remainder of us along promising that he would come back to sort the rest of the volunteers out later. We were rushed off to the train station with all of our belongings and tickets in hand. Luckily we arrived with 40mins before the train was due to depart and were onboard and in our beds within 30 minutes of arriving. Unfortunately I didn't get to say a proper goodbye to my project partner because of the mix up with the dates but I have been in contact with my host family via email.
So that just about sums up my time on the orientation course in Beijing, It was an absolutely fantastic experience and one which I would love to repeat again. If I have missed anything out (Pretty certain I haven't) I will add it in later in another blog. Keep an eye out for the next blog which will talk about the train journey to the projects and my first day in Yihuang, It won't be anywhere near as long as this one :)
Love from yihuang!
Alex
- comments
Far Very informative and readable. Looking forward to the next.