Forbidden City

On Sunday evening, we had hoped to go to the football match (Beijing vs Shanghai) but it
didn't work out so a few of us bought some different Chinese beers and watched it on TV in one of our rooms. Shanghai won, if you're wondering!! There's a couple more home matches while we're here but I think we've got stuff already planned in the evening so I don't think we'll be able to make them.

I'm still not fully adjusted to the timezone and I'm still wide awake late at night - which is a problem when we have class starting at 8 am every day from today onwards!!

Yesterday morning, we had our Chinese placement test to put us into classes. I think 95% of us are beginners! The tutor was very impressed with how much we had picked up over the past few days of hanging around Beijing though. The opening ceremony was nowhere near as impressive as the first cohort had described - I guess it's old news now!! It was video-taped and the videographer is following us around to a lot of our activities and going to make a DVD of the 3 weeks so we have a momento at the end of the trip.

We went to the Forbidden City yesterday afternoon, which was pretty interesting. It was cool to walk across Tiananmen (sp?) Square - although hard to think about the 1989 protest/massacre. I was a bit disappointed that they didn't give us any information about it - we didn't have a tour guide or anything. I know the general jist of it but it'd be nice to have heard more about it from the Chinese perspective. I've actually just tried to look it up on Wikipedia and the site is censored!! Surprise surprise..

Forbidden City was beautiful and ornate, it was an honour to visit a place like that. It offered a real insight into Chinese culture, I think. As usual, we got stopped often for photographs - I'm starting to get used to it by now, I feel like a bit of D-List celebrity! Children often run up to us and shout 'Hello!' and then run away...they're very cute.

After the Forbidden City visit, most of us were feeling very drained after a lot of long days in the sun and not very much sleep. It's been getting hotter and hotter every day, I think someone said it was 35 yesterday and 37 today. It doesn't actually feel THAT hot though...I guess I'm getting used to it!! About 10 of us decided to brave the 'bar street' and had a great evening drinking Chinese beer. I've discovered I have a great proficiency for haggling and I took on the role of official haggler for the evening - we got every price knocked down. The Chinese seem much happier to lower their prices when you haggle in Chinese!! I think they really appreciate that we're making the effort to learn their language. We left the last club around 1 am to get taxis back to the hotel - we didn't want to stay out too late because we had our first Chinese lesson this morning.

We had class today from 8 - 11:30 and then from 1 - 2:30. We've learn all the sounds and intonations - it was really useful. I also learned my name in Chinese - she had to vary it a bit because there are two Rachels in the class, so my name has become : 'lei xi' - which translates to 'thunder glass'. The classes were very useful and I'm really looking forward to learning a lot more.

We've had the afternoon free to chill out so we went across the street to the supercheap bar (it's basically somebody's back garden) for lunch - it works out about 50p for lunch there, it's amazingly cheap. After that we went to the supermarket on campus to get some bits and pieces and were amazed by the selection - people always say to buy everything before you come to China because you won't be able to get anything here but they had EVERYTHING and then some...it was pretty amazing actually.

We're going to a traditional Chinese tea house now so I'd better head off! I'll put up some more pictures later.