Blog 1: Edgar has landed..

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Tuesday January 20th - 21st
Well, I set off for China on Tuesday afternoon feeling hungover, tired and sad from saying goodbye to my boy.
The flight (Emiratres) was really good and it wasn’t long before I arrived in Dubai. Dubai airport was enormous and I had a 3 hour wait for my connecting flight to Beijing. I spent the time having a wee and then read my Woody Allen book in amongst all the Chinese waiting for the flight. It felt a bit strange to be the only western person there (no sign of anyone else) but I guess it was something Im going to have to get used to.
The flight to Beijing was also ok and the whole trip seemed to be over fairly quickly. I met up with 7 others from the Teach Travel programme and we went through passport control together. That all went well but the police guys are a bit scary and take ages scrutinizing your passport and looking at your face and then your passport picture and then your face again...although I had been told that they like to look at the photos and have a little laugh amongst themselves!
We met at the designated meeting point (Starbucks!!) and waited for a few others to turn up and chatted amongst ourselves. I went to test if my cash card works in China (I had no money whatsoever on me) and luckily it does! Phew! I am now officially rich (at least by Chinese standards). We eventually got to go outside where I had my first taste of outside Beijing. It was very grey and overcast - I guess it was all the pollution as you could make out the sun but it was really gloomy. We drove to the university where we are staying and I have to say, it looked grey, bleak and cold everywhere. To not go into too much detail, we got to the university, picked up our I.D badges, our food allowance passes, our laundry and internet tokens and the keys to our rooms. We went straight to dinner as we were about to miss the end of the canteen opening hours and you basically go up to the kiosk, point at what you want, get the token bowl of rice, zap your card to pay for it all and pick up your chopsticks and go. The food was pretty basic, the meat unidentifiable and the canteen is FREEZING. We didn’t linger and I went quite quickly up to my room to find out who I would be living with for the next 4 weeks.
When I got upstairs the other 2 girls I’m sharing with were already there and moved in. One is a girl called Claire who has travelled from South Africa and Vietnam by herself and is going on to New Zealand after her 6 months in China. She is 31 and has just left her job in marketing for a cosmetics company. The other lady is Vikki who is 40 and just quit her job teaching drama in London. They are both really nice. We have also adopted Jonathan from downstairs who is from Essex, 31 and very funny, and his flatmate Martyn from Holland. I’m not sure how old he is, (in his 30’s) because he is very quiet and we don’t ever really hear him speak. Occasionally guest appearing in our little group is Marion who is 54 and been given permission by her children to take this year off and away. Everyone else is quite young - most are going back to start university in September but they are from all over. Mainly from the UK, but some from Denmark, Finland, Mexico, Holland, Sweden, Germany. We are very international!
Our apartment is surprisingly nice. I wasn’t sure what to expect but its quite large and we have a small kitchen and a bathroom with REALLY hot water (phew), a real toilet and not a hole in the floor, and radiators that are uussuuaallllllllyy on so its quite toasty. I have my sleeping bag to sit in so I’m well wrapped!
We went to bed fairly early as it had been a really long day. Unfortunately it would appear I am now only able to sleep in 4 hour long stints.


Thursday 22nd January
We had team building on today(my idea of hell) and had to spend the day freezing in the university sports gym doing ridiculous team games with a crazy man flown in especially from Hong Kong. He liked clapping but unfortunately his pronunciation of it was “crapping” which made everyone giggle (we’re all grown ups here!) and every time a group had done something we had to “show our appreciation by crapping”. Hilarious. But I guess you had to be there...
It was -10 degrees Celsius during the day today and I have never felt cold like it. Your face freezes and your joints seize up and you feel like you’re going to die. It would have perhaps been nicer to have come here in July for a pleasant and far more civilised 30 degrees. The wind is biting and I am wearing every layer of clothing I have. .bad times.

Friday 23rd January
Team building again this morning, more crapping and generally slowly dying of cold. This afternoon we went to a Chinese department store and bought hats and scarves. We went downstairs into the supermarket and looked round - it was bedlam! I guess it was busy as it is nearly new year but there are so many staff chanting out their particular special offer and if you linger too long anywhere they come and want you to buy their product. The seafood section had tanks of crabs and lobsters and turtles, all alive and waiting to be bagged and a tray of massive prawns that kept leaping onto the floor to be picked up and chucked back in by the guys working there. There were people making dumplings and rolling bread - would have made wonderful photos but I wasn’t allowed. Rubbish.
Friday night was our welcome dinner at a restaurant just down the road and there were new year envelopes with money in for each of us and lots of food. We had sea urchins and chicken feet and duck and all manner of other unknown items..but pretty tasty all round. I must confess, I didn’t eat the chicken feet. I try most things but simply could not bring myself to do it. Plus most things were stone cold and I think feet would be nicer with heat added. That’s just my view...We got back to our room and as it’s so cold, Vikki’s key snapped off in our lock. After lots of to-ing and fro-ing we finally found a man who tried for an hour to drill into the lock so we could get in. After that, he just kicked the door down. Excellent. Luckily, our room has rather bizarrely, two doors so we can still lock at least one of them.


Saturday 24th January.
We had our first day in the classroom today. Our teacher is a nice Australian lady who is here with her husband, and we had 3 hours with her in the morning. The classroom is so cold, there is no heating and you can see your breath in the air. She went to complain in our break and has said if nothing is done she will refuse to teach us. We shall see how this progresses...after the break we had a lesson with our grammar teacher who is a man from Ireland and as crazy as a coconut. Totally bonkers, but very funny so we like him.
Saturday night we all made some dumplings which is a new year tradition. They then got sent into the kitchen and cooked for us and they were really nice. I popped into the computer room after to try and get connected to the internet and discovered a jar on the windowsill containing a few sticks of bamboo and some fishes. They must have been very chilly on there and weren’t keen on having their picture taken. Afterwards, a few of us went into Beijing’s drinking district. It would appear that I have developed a slight obsession with taking photos of lanterns...but I can’t help it! They’re sooooo pretty and shiny!! We went to a couple of bars where it seems standard for there to be a stage at one end with a band playing, with an occasional break for dancers to randomly come in, plug in their I-pods, remove most of their clothes, dance and then leave again. In our bar, we had a great 3 piece band, with a very cheesy man on keyboards who clearly thought he was a lot better than he actually was, a long haired rock god who was very good on the guitar, and a very sweet lady who gave me a big thumbs up when I started filming them! They were great and very funny. The two dancers who came in was a very snotty looking belly dancer who had a face like a slapped arse, or a bulldog sucking piss off a nettle (according to Vikki) and a girl in hot pants and bikini who looked a bit like..well, a stripper actually.. Hhmmmm. But beer is cheap, so we like this too.


Sunday 25th January.
Today is new years eve (Spring Festival) and also my boys birthday. Totally fed up with crappy canteen food that is cold and insipid, we went to pizza hut. It was great. Sorry everyone, but when it’s this cold, you need comfort. We then went to the Olympic Village and walked around the Birds Nest Stadium where our heads nearly fell off it was so cold. After general mincing around (and I have the video to prove it) went jumped in a taxi and went to Carrefour. I headed straight for the underwear section and now have thermal vest, under-trousers, long socks and leg warmers for my legs AND to put on my arms! I also got some Goji berries for 50p. There are about £6 in the UK! Madness. But I’m rich now, rich I tells ya! After our shopping (we had to be fast as the store closed early for NYE) we went out to a frozen lake for our TTC private party. We had a bar rented out just for us by this lake which apparently in the summer they put all the sofas outside. We had to get down all these side streets to get there and this is where I saw the China I had always imagined with gorgeous buildings and old looking mysterious shops. It was a really nice setting for NYE and I was even brave enough to head outside for the fireworks at midnight, although they had been going off all round the city from when we woke up. I have never heard anything like it - there are fire crackers going off everywhere, all on the pavements and tied to railings. People are firing fireworks out of boxes across the streets at each other - its pretty crazy. As we walked to try and find a taxi that night, the streets were just full of firework ash and debris.


Monday 26th January.
Today is new years day and most things are closed. I had a great sleep last night, I think I am fully the right way round now and no longer waking at 4 in the morning. (We are 8 hours ahead here). We haven’t done much and it has been nice to collect ourselves together a bit before school starts again tomorrow...

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Comments

[Mike]

Chicken Feet Madness
Ok Edgar step away from the lanterns, what did they ever do to deserve such invasion of privacy I ask you? Sounds like you have landed on your feet with a really good mix of people so I’m please for you. Have you managed to corrupt Jonathan’s flat mate yet and bring him out of his shell? You’re usually good at that after a few to many sherbets’. I hope to Christ you have finished your “crapping” team building as I’m with you all the way on that one, having to endure forced scenarios and role-plays – my idea is get down the pub, share a beer and chat fart for a bit – that’s a great team building exercise ;-) I wish I was there to see a grown woman buckle with giggles as he said “crapping”, you’re such a child. Weather here has been a nightmare with the snow – slipping and sliding all over the place but I’m not going to go on about it for too much as your probably enduring another noodle eating -10 degrees in the canteen. Well done for not chowing on the chicken foot, I would probably disown you after such endeavors. I’m all for experiencing new things but that just looked wrong on many, many levels. I hope your still having a good time and have found an improved night spot offering better entertainment. Even though your rich now and beer is cheap remember you’re an old woman now and the morning after will hit you like a brick wall (I have an image of you screwing up your face now after being called an old woman - hehee). Be safe and I look forward to reading the next installment of Lucy’s thrilling adventure.