Arrivial in Beijing is not without confusion, as the obvious langauge barrier presented itself to us. For the first day we got by with our poorly pronounced ni hao’s and xiexie’s, but thankfully there was a representive from BLCU at the airport to meet and drop us off at our designated accomodation (which by the way is a very nice shared room with A/C and TV) and the very nice people at the course regisration desk were patient and very good at understanding our tired hand gestures / ‘phrase-book Mandarin’.
Our first days in the city were spent exploring the local area (I heart wu) as well as a visit to the forbidden city and Tian’anmen Sq via the very well ventilated subway system (London, take notes). Weather in Beijing takes a while to get used to, with extremely hot days followed by some extremely servere storms which seem to take advantage of the lack of drains in the streets to form immense flash floods. This resulted in us having to cross a river (‘road’) up to our knees to get to the local bar.
The first day of classes is a simple test to find out how much you already know, for some this was a frustrating experience as 2 years of speaking/listening/writing in pinyin still leaves you in the beginner class to learn the characters from the beginning. My test was pretty simple and lasted about 30 seconds after I told the examiner, “I cannot speak Chinese”.
On the first weekend there was a free trip to the Great Wall of China (about 90 mins on the bus from BLCU) which was a really great exprience and everyone had a great day. Although some top tips would be to take your own food and water (prices up to 10 times more than in the city) and if you insist on buying stuff from the tourist stalls then you can really haggle down prices to seemingly ridiculous amounts. Also, take advantage of the cable car up and the toboggan down!
4 hours of class per day really takes it out of you, and we all think the original idea of 6 hours would have just been too intense. During our first week we have spent most afternoons making flashcards and revising the mornings vocabulary in groups.
Although there is a quite a lot of work, we are all still finding time to explore the city’s amazing array of restaurants with food from around the world. There has even been an adventure into the more colourful side of Beijing’s nightlife.
