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Sorry this is so late, we were so busy when we were in Beijing that I didn't have time to write anything, and since we got to Jiujiang we've not had internet because Project Trust told our hosts we wouldn't want it. Thanks PT. But anyway...
We got to Beijing at about 10.30 on Saturday morning. The flights were pretty good because the planes were so fancy. Free drinks, three-course meals, snacks and personal touch screen tv/computers for each seat. The tv/computer things were amazing - you could call or text other seats on the plane with them, play games (if you turned the accompanying remote over it was a games controller), watch the ground below or the sky ahead from cameras placed on the body of plane and choose between loads of films and tv shows... I spent the first flight to Abu Dhabi watching Miranda and A Bug's Life and playing Tetris. The second flight on to Beijing was pretty bad, just because we were trying to sleep then and it was too cramped to sleep comfortably. We were delayed by about an hour as well (technical difficulties, think we were missing a left filangee), sat on a plane in the desert with no air-con, which is not pretty. Also the guy behind me kept kicking my seat back up whenever I tried to recline it at all - RUDE.
Beijing airport is swanky too, and ridiculously huge - it takes a 15 minute train journey just to get from immigration to the baggage collection! Everything is super-efficient and super-clean, and you get to rate the passport control staff on their performance, which is fun.
The first day we arrived was quite relaxed, just wandering around Tianenmen Square by ourselves. The group I was with ended up skirting around the outside gardens and temples of the Forbidden City, which is right next to Tianenmen Square. The only temple we went into (entrance fee only £1! when it's like 50p just to use a public toilet in England!) was the Temple of Ancestors. Like most things here, it's enormous, and much more impressive than it looks in photos. The recently-added displays let it down though. At each end of the hall, there are small tableaus of about 5 mannikins dressed as emperors and empresses, sectioned off with cheap yellow tape. The mannikins look like cast-offs from tacky high street shops, and they're wearing fake eyelashes and bad make-up. One of them had the world's worst fake beard as well - basically wool on a string, tied around his upper lip.
We got lost (obviously) when we tried to walk back to the hostel from the Forbidden City. We wandered for ages in the wrong direction, managed to ask for directions, wandered back the way we'd come and managed to flag down, one-by-one, enough taxis and tuc-tucs to get us all back. Most taxis drove straight past us grinning and waving and some pulled over, then sped off again when we took too long getting over to them, but when it's £1.50 for a 20 minute journey you can't really complain.
On our second day, the 27 of us were split into two groups, taking it in turns to go for a cooking lesson and then for a scavenger hunt around the hostel. The cooking lesson was held in a house in a hutong (alley, basically) a short bus drive from our hostel, where we all stood around a table in the courtyard and learnt to make chowmein noodles and gungbao chicken. The scavenger hunt meant teaming up with our project partner and trying to answer a sheet of questions, with just a basic map to help us. Questions were things like, "what do they sell at 2-3 Jiangdozhen?" and "try some beijing-yun-... do you like it?"
We found our way into more hutongs, ones that were obviously aimed at tourists but still really good for shopping. A lot of the stuff I genuinely wanted (bracelets, fans, candles, that sort of thing) but there was other stuff that me and Nicole just stopped to stare at because it was so weird. Even in China they have tons of Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara and Audrey Hepburn memorabilia, but there's also A LOT of Hitler merchandise. Pikachu dressed up as Hitler, Donald Duck as Hitler, Hitler in Obama-style election posters... The worst was a KFC spoof mousemat that had Hitler as Colonel Saunders and the slogan "Hitler Fried Citizens".
That night was spent at a guest house in a small village close to the Great Wall. I was in a room with 7 of the other girls, sharing a communal bed made literally of bricks with only the thinnest mat on top. Bed is actually a really generous description for what it was, I was more comfortable sleeping on the floor in Corfu airport! We didn't even try to sleep till early the next morning though, so it didn't really matter.
In the morning we walked/hiked up to a remote part of the wall. The man from the guesthouse had to come part of the way with us, because apparently it's actually out of bounds. The walk was fine - a bit steep and very sweaty (niiiceee) but it took most people less than an hour. Before we got there we had thought we were going to the touristy but of the wall where you get to buy novelty hats and toboggan back down but turns out that's too mainstream for us gap-yah types. The part of the wall we went to was completely empty apart from us and, apart from a couple of hundred metres around where we reached it, had trees growing thickly from the main path. We had a nice big watch-tower thing to climb and get a better view from as well; the mist meant you could only see so far, but it's still a view not many other people will have seen.
Continuing our intense research into Chinese culture, about 20 of us went to a karaoke bar after we got back to Beijing that night. The place we went to was called Partyworld, and had a sign outside that made it look like a Wacky Warehouse, but inside it was really fancy - huge (yeah, almost everything is huge here) and made completely of marble. We hired a room for our party, the staff brought us several trays of drinks and then we spent a couple of hours murdering "Summer of 69" and "Ain't No Mountain High Enough". Everyone ended up screaming along and dancing, it was hilarious. Embarrassing if you left the room to use the toilet though, because our room could be heard all the way down the hall and all the Chinese staff stared at you and laughed to each other. Towards the end, we lost control over the karaoke machine and had to listen to Tik Tok about 4 times in a row. Somehow we managed to get everyone in taxis back to the hostel (one volunteer left a bag with her passport in it in the taxi, but another managed to chase down the taxi and get it back, so it was okay), and then we headed out again to bars near the hostel. It was a really, really good night. And v cultural, obvs.
Our last day in Beijing was spent on two meetings. In the morning we met a past Project Trust volunteer, who now lives and works in China, at the British Consullate. He talked about his experiences in China and then spent an hour answering our questions. I think he was expecting questions about where he stayed for his project, where was good to visit, what his favourite thing about China was, that sort of thing, but instead we had questions about politics, the extent of westernisation, Tibet, and triads. In the afternoon, we visited the CEAIE, the organisation that, alongside Project Trust, is responsible for bringing us to China. There were two representatives there to speak to us, Michael and Doris, and they were both lovely. Michael was telling us how he had studied for a year in Britain and so already considered us his friends, also that he understood the difficulties of leaving home - such as missing Downton Abbey. The next speech was reaallly long though, and those of us who'd been out the night before really stuggled to concentrate. Altogether there were 2 hours of speeches, and at least two people slept through parts of it. Michael and Doris were talking in minute detail about EVERYTHING, so we were expecting the same in the Q&A. Nope: "So what's the average day for a Chinese student?" "Well, they go to school. And then... they go home."
Our time in Beijing has been really good, I think we're all just disappointed we only had a couple of days together as a group. As far as acclimatisation goes, we've all managed to pick up the most basic Chinese phrases and realised that if you ever want to cross a road you can't wait for the cars to stop, you have to walk out in front of them. Our hostel had western-style toilets, so for the most part we've managed to avoid the squat-toilets Sing told me horror stories about. The food is good, although I almost never know what I'm eating, and I expected more noodles (the only ones we've had so far were the ones we made ourselves in the cooking lesson). I don't think I've eaten anything weird yet, although other people have eaten whale testicles and fish eyes. Breakfast has been rubbish. Steamed bread doesn't taste great, neither does rice porridge, and why would you even serve shredded onion at breakfast? The amount of English people speak varies a lot, but for the most part we can get by with pointing and smiling anyway.
My train to Jiujiang leaves at 12 on Wednesday, and I'll arrive at 4.30am Thursday morning. 16 hour train journey, woop woop! Excited to be able to stop living out of my suitcase though.
Thankyou for the emails, speak soon (hopefully)!
Ella xxx
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