Blogs from Haikou, Hainan, China, Asia - page 4

If you watch the video you will get a summary of exactly what we see in all areas of the campus, from dawn till dusk, every day since we arrived, and you will probably be as curious as we were as to who these guys are and why they are training like this. You would assume that it's the army, but after approaching many of them we gradually found out that these are actually the new students, and not just a select few: every single Chinese fresher in every university in China has to take part in 17 days of military training in their first few weeks at uni. Mad. It's their almost completely opposite, communist equivalent of Fresher's Week. They start at 5.40 every day and carry on until 9pm, with short breaks. Many, including ... read more

It's been quite a while since my last entry, but il try to get you up to speed... Firstly, we got to the gym, finally, a few days after playing tennis and it's surprisingly good! It's pretty much all free weights, and if you overlook weights held together with random wires and a few very dodgy looking pieces of equipment, it could almost be England! We've had a couple (or 3?!) weeks of Chinese lessons now, which have been really good, quite challenging and at some points you just kinda look at the teacher thinking 'what the bloody hell are you talking about?!', but most of the time it's alright! The big thing we've done recently is camp on a beach...the plan was to originally go to sanya, but due to the fact that itl be ... read more

Photos of Haikou... read more

Next entry, So, I'm lying here recovering from an absolutely terrible beijiu hangover...but we'll come to that... Yesterday we decided that having bikes would definitely be worth it, so we decided to go to carrefour and buy bikes, apparently carrefour has literally everything! We ended up wandering around carrefour for ages and finding some pretty interesting things, including turtles, frogs and deer penis...very weird. The bikes there were actually way too small for us, which was annoying, but we had a good explore and then because our chinese friend nick was with us we decided we'd continue our pursuit of bicycles in one of the market areas of the city. We caught tuktuks there and ended up in a pretty rundown area of haikou. There were loads of small shops all competing with each other and ... read more

Right, next entry! Wev been in Hainan for a couple of days now, and it's all been a ridiculously hectic rush trying to do all kinds of things. Luckily today we've had a Chinese student helping us all day, I don't know her real name, but we've nicknamed her Han Solo. We also met up with Sai Hou, a Chinese student who was in Newcastle last year, it was completely by coincidence, but she ended up spending a lot of time with us today aswell just helping Han Solo sort stuff out. Today we managed to go to the police office to tell them that we were in the country...which was completely unsuccessful, as apparently we need residence letters from Haida to prove to them that we're really there and not some trick of the light ... read more