Ni Hao from Beijing

Beijing is a BIG city. I arrived on the 10th with my parents (aka my translators – how fortunate for me!). We stayed at a nice hotel in the city and I officially moved to the Conference Centre Hotel in BLCU yesterday.

In the mean time, I managed to get myself registered, paid for tuition, and got my student card. Fortunately it wasn’t too tricky. Everything was quite organised in a chaotic way! The queues were long though.

So far, the atmosphere has been great – so much energy about! There are so many people from different countries here – a lot of students from Korea and Japan, as well as Indonesia and Thailand. There are also lots of Americans, and it seems, Australians and other countries. Incidentally I have even met someone who came from Hurstville! (in case you don’t know, it’s very close to my home in Sydney) – imagine being half way around the world and meeting someone from the next suburb!

My room at the Conference Centre (CC) is small, but nice and clean. I’m happy with it. There’s even a window that I can open to let fresh air in. The bathroom, though, gets flooded during a shower, as there’s no shower recess, only a shower curtain…I was wondering what the carpet stain in front of the shower was, then I realised that after a longer shower (eg. After hair washing), some of the water overflowed out of the bathroom!...may be this is a strategy to reduce water usage…ie we can’t shower for too long? The only other thing is the hard bed (feels like sleeping on a wooden block), but I was reassured by one of the girls I met that the beds here at CC are the best in uni. The other nicer place is Dorm 17, which is apparently quite nice, but the beds there are even harder, she told me! OK, to be fair, even the beds at the nice 4 star Capital Hotel in the city were quite hard as well (but not as hard!!!).

Otherwise, CC is a great place – very convenient - only 2 minutes from the classrooms, and there are a couple of nice and cheap restaurants downstairs (Chinese and Japanese) and even a little convenient store. There’s also a laundry with dryer costing 3 yuan per wash and 6 yuan each time we use the dryer.

I had my placement test this morning too. It was a bit of a disaster! : ) The test itself was fairly simple and may be even painless, actually – a teacher comes to you and have a chat to gauge your level of mandarin. Well, this is when I realised how different it is to study phrases – how to go shopping, whatever, and to actually speak to an actual person! In reality, people don’t actually follow the scripts in textbooks! So I guess this is the value for me in being in China right now – I have to practise as much as possible in real situations, not just in the classroom. I find out which class I will go into tomorrow morning, and have till the 17th to change class if needed.