Rach's Adventures in China

Yesterday, after my last entry, I dossed around the apartment for a bit before heading over to the hairdresser's to check in on some friends. After my success last weekend, two of the girls decided to brave the same place although they went much more extreme than me - Liz got her hair re-blonded and her pixie cut trimmed shorter, while Caroline went from having long, thick, wavy golden brown hair to having short, dark red curly hair!! They both looked fantastic. Their cuts cost way more than mine - the salon uses L'Oreal products so to have colours and perms costs quite a lot - not as much as in the UK but not cheap!!

To celebrate their new hair, we got snazzed up a bit and headed out into town with some of the other girls to a hutong that they had discovered last week. It was by a lot of the backpackers hostels so there was many other Westerners around - not quite as many stares from the Chinese as usual! We had Peking duck at one of the restaurants there and then split off into groups as we had different agendas - my group ended up at a quaint little teahouse and were served free tea samples for the next couple of hours. A few other English girls came in and we invited them to join our table - turns out they had all just graduated from Oxford and were travelling around for a bit before starting work back in London. The teas were all lovely - my favourites were jasmine mixed with rosebud and milk oolong (which tasted a bit like white chocolate!). We also tried a really nice peach blossom tea and a sugary chrysanthemum tea, which were both nice but a bit too sweet for me. The only one I didn't really like was a gunpowder tea - it was very smoky. We sat there for ages chatting away and then finally decided on which ones to buy - I went for a pot of jasmine and a pot of rosebuds, of course! After that, we met up with everyone else at a bar in one of the hostels - it was really chilled out and one of those international kind of hostels where you feel like you could be anywhere in the world. It was cool to hang out there for a bit, they even had some live music. Becky requested 'A Whole New World' (from Aladdin) on our behalf - it's been the theme tune of our trip...long story! The guy didn't know enough of it so we decided to call it a night and head back to the hotel. While it was fun to be in a backpackers place for a bit, it kinda felt a bit touristy. I guess I can't really say much when I've been in a group of 100 Westerners for this whole trip - but somehow I feel like my experience of Beijing has been a bit more authentic than someone who stayed at a hostel here for a few days and just saw the Great Wall, Forbidden City, etc. Although I guess what's made my stay here more authentic was the fact that I've actually been able to speak Chinese to the locals!

While I'm sitting here typing this, Becky is next to me reading my last blog entry and we started talking about the visit to the British Council and how we seem to hit a brick wall whenever we ask questions about the political situation in China. It's really frustrating...you can't really get any straight answers. If you ask a Chinese person a question which they don't want to answer, they will just change the subject or find some way of avoiding answering your question in any comprehendable way. Becky went to church here on Sunday and apparently only Chinese people are allowed to preach - even in the English part of the church - because they don't want outsiders to spread any foreign doctrine. This seems a bit strange since they're encouraging their youth to go abroad and open their minds to education and new ideas in other countries.....yet the impression we're given here is that they are still highly indoctrinated with Chinese pride and nationalistic identity. We've just been talking again about the guy at the British Council meeting who yelled 'Are you Chinese or are you a foreigner?' - it's interesting that has such a nationalist point of view - it almost seemed like that the kind of attitude you could imagine someone having if they had never left China - not that of someone who had lived in London for 10 years and who used words like "cool" and tried to show us how well he fitted into life in the UK.

Anyway! This morning we had Chinese class from 8 - 11:30 as usual and then again from 1 - 2:30. We reviewed everything that we've learned and then worked on our little performance number which we have to do tomorrow during the closing ceremony - my class is singing the song from the acrobatics show with a little dance, as well as some acrobatic demonstrations! Should be interesting.. The afternoon was pretty lazy and turned into a little stroll with a bit of shopping down one of the streets near uni. Around 7 pm we met up with some more people for dinner at the cheap bar across the street and now I've just come back to write this before I go study up for the exam in the morning. I'm not worried about it at all, it should be dead easy, but it would be good to go into it with confidence. It's hard to believe that Chinese class is over - I want to learn so much more. When I get back to uni, I'm definitely going to keep taking Mandarin lessons.