Beijing 2005

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Since this is a TRAVEL blog, it would be perhaps best for me to post about countries overseas which I have been to recently. Well, the most recent one would be last year's trip to Beijing as Sec 3 EOY programme. We (30 of us) went to High School affliated to Tsinghua University. 😊 Here's the rough day to day events when I was there.

First Day
Whoa I woke up late today so I was late in meeting the group at the airport by about half an hour. Arrived ar Beijing around 3.30 pm. The lines in the airport were super long and by the time we actually got to the school, it was nearly 6 and it was dark. It is sad that the sun sets really early over there during winter. Looked like it was 8.30 actually but it wasn't.
Accomodation. We carried our own luggages up 6 floors. The hostel rooms were really disappointing. In every room there are 4 bunk beds and 5 metal cupboards. Each room holds 3-4 girls so we all slept on the bottom bunks. The mattresses are like paper thin. The doors were meant to be autolocked when we closed it but my room door is as easy to push open as ABC. There were communal showers there and that was really unpleasant. There are like 3 to 4 people in the shower room at one time and we had to use shower cards to actually turn on the water flow. It is freezing cold at night, esp after taking a shower. Gonna wear my thick jacket to sleep. Night.

Second Day
We had a tour of the school. Its quite big really. Attended their flag raising which started around 10 am. Their lines originally looked straight.. but after a while.. it sort of got crooked. They have a total of 6 levels in their school and every level has a different colour uniform. Chu Yi wears yellow and grey. Chu Er wears orange and white. Chu San wears purple and white. Gao Yi wears yellow and navy. Gao Er wears white and navy. Gao San wears red and navy. Kinda interesting. NYGH only has one standard uniform.
Had a seperate lesson in one of their small lecture rooms. Beijing history. I totally tuned out. We were supposed to see the Urban Planning Museum but somehow or another it was closed. Screwed up. So we sort of went around the streets shopping. Didn't get much in the end. Ah. My turn to shower. Bye.

Third Day
First lesson we had with the local students today. We had to carry our own stools to the classroom. The lessons were kinda boring. I mean, come on, physics in Chinese? Argh. The classrooms look around the same size as ours but its much more cramped here. Prob coz they have like 50 stucents whereas my class has 16. Big diff. We went for lessons with the Chu Er so we're a year older than them all. We had an English lesson with them too. Someone wanna tell me how "No news is a good news" is correct? Some student said that and the teacher was like, hmmm *nod* *nod*. Like..err....And oh! They had morning workout. Some students were super enthu. :P
Visited the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature. It was much too long of a tour. I got bored of seeing all the different writers and they were 3 levels to go too. Bah. 4.30 pm we went back to the hostel. Ate chocolate ice cream and the nice thing about it is that it doesn't melt :P And everyone is super fast in showering.. ah well. the members of my group now have new nicknames for each of us. Let's see..
Ziwei - Ice Cream Rubbish Bin
Jing - Chocolate Rubbish Bin
Hannie - Chips Rubbish Bin
Bonnie - Bread Rubbish Bin
Me - Soft Drinks Rubbish Bin
All according to stuff we like to eat. Bonnie's one is the only healthy 'addiction'.

Fourth day
Well, the local students got lucky. Coz we're here and listening in to their lessons, they got to miss a test. heh. And I must comment, their tables are practically half the size f ours in school. And the area below their desk is stuffed full with papers and books. They have blackboards instead of whiteboards so there is this irritating scratching noise when they write. Maths was tough to understand fully in Chinese but we got through the lesson in the end.
Seal carving lesson. That was cool. I did a lousy job of carving my ‘ying’ out on the stone but at least it was more entertaining than sitting in a room and listening someone go on and on about historic events. There was also a talk about the Summer Palace and I zoned out here too. I remember falling asleep at one point and the picture on the screen was about a clock or sth. I woke up like 3 or 4 times later on and it was still the same pic. -.-‘ We visited a part of the Summer Palace and it was full of rocks.. how interesting… Already dark when we left.

Fifth Day
Another freezing morning. Something about last night… Some china student opened the shower room door when someone was still inside. There was like creaming and everything. Someone else told me there was a nude person running down the corridor. Thank goodness for me I didn’t witness that. Totally gross… We are on a way to Tianjin with the TLE and its gonna be nearly a 3 hour long bus ride. Shall take a snooze.
Ah… on the streets of Tianjin was kinda fun. We had paos for lunch and then went to Wal-Mart for a behind the scenes tour and then shopping along some ancient culture street. We had dumplings for dinners. No rice served at all. Ziwei was going on about a hot water guy. ‘hot water’ guy that is. Fantasizing about the kettle with the long spout that he held. And finally! The hotel stay. We’re staying a night at Astor Hotel. 4-star apparently. And they played HP and POA on HBO! WOOT!

Sixth Day
We visited Nankai University today. They started off by showing us a video of their school and then introduced 4 students that are from SMU and are there in Nankai on a exchange programme that lasts an entire semester. Two guys and two girls. Ziwei was guessing that one of the guys was from ACS(I) coz he looked like the type but it the end it turned out he was from Chinese High. General response was of “WAH” and laughter, from Ziwei and Hannie esp. The iothers were from SCGS, Dunman and Cat. High. The school fees at Nankai are like S$4000 a term. I think it’s quite ex…
We had a tour of the school. They have a huge lake in the middle of it all and I don’t know what it’s for. Haha. Group E and F, which is basically nine of us from 3/8 and 3/9, plus Yu Jing got segregated. At first they evenly split the entire group into two to follow 2 seniors each. In the end, with 6 groups, it became 2 and 4 groups. Ah well. We had a nice lunch though.
Zhou En Lai Museum was the next stop. It was quite nice to look through the place but I thought it smelt rather like a toilet… Then dinner! It was good, esp the Beijing Duck. Bonnie became a tea drunkie heehee. And they brought a birthday cake for me and Hannie too. So nice.

Seventh Day
Back at the hostel already. We ran around another part of the Summer Palace so as to solve a “Murder Mystery”. That was quite simple to complete really. And lunch was served in a little western café called Sculpting in Time. It’s quite cute. There were many cat designs at this café. I finished all the food they served. Yum yum yum. There was soup, pasta and muffin. Not that much really but the servings are big.
We went to the Beijing Ancient Observatory to take a look at the instruments they used before to look at the stars. Apparently it isn’t a very popular place but oh well. We even created our own weird animals out of a star map. Loved Ziwei’s dino with the electric guitar :P. Dinner was at Lao Ba Sha. It’s a restaurant for Singaporean food. Ate Hainanese Chicken Rice. It was really good. I didn’t exactly miss Singaporean food but at least it was warm..

Eighth Day
All my roommates and I woke up late today. Instead of 6 am, we woke up around 6.30am and the lights were already on by then. It’s a Sunday and when we went to the canteen, it was locked… there was food laid out for us but the doors weren’t open. We had to resort to banging on the doors to get someone to open them for us. At least we got to eat in the end.
We spent the afternoon at Xiu Shui Market, chaotic place, and Wangfujing on a scavenger hunt. No teachers or anything, just the group together moving around. Took the subway to get to Wangfujing. The meeting point was a café called, “Bu Jian Bu San (Be there, be square)”. And hey have nicer toilets here. Clean at least. My feet hurt from all the walking.
Beijing Duck for dinner again.

Ninth Day
Had 2 maths lessons today with the local students. I feel asleep in the 2nd one. The stuff they learn are like stuff we learn in sec 1 or 2. The afternoon was spent at Soong Ching Ling’s residence. The place is humongous and the rooms are so nicely furnished. I wished I lived in a house like that. And her dove cote is actually full of pigeons.. oO
We played ping pong with some students from Chu Er Class 1. That was rather fun. They learnt our Nan Zhong Quan and we learnt their morning workout. So we finally made some friends and it’s the ninth day already. Kinda sad. And I am really lousy at ping pong XP

Tenth Day
We had our first Chinese lesson with the locals today. They were learning Han Zi which is basically stuff we learnt last year in Chinese culture lesson. I thought it would be tough for us to understand their standard of Chinese but it wasn’t that bad in the end. Its kinda boring to sort of be relearning all the Jia Gu Wen, Jing Wen and more. And the Chinese teacher is strange. She wrote wushu the “wu” wrongly coz she added a ‘pie’… but oh well.
Hannie commented how the students are always looking at what we write in our notebooks. We tried to figure out if they could understand us when we talk English really fast. No result in the end. Another Physics lesson. Bleh. I think the teacher screwed up… Somehow she could divide 0.2 by 0.8 and get 0.125.. maybe I missed something out. Bah.
And finally, the afternoon where we get to shop ourselves. Its interesting to bargain. I got a bag reduced from 190 rmb to 70. :P And the funniest one was this jacket I bought. My group just looked at some jackets in a shop and asked the price. The guy was selling it at 480 rmb. We walked away coz that price was way too high and that guy started reducing prices, shouting at us while we walked. First down to 260 rmb then 80. In the end we got the price at 75. So the group in all bought 6 jackets. Heh
Lao She Teahouse. I bought 206 rmb worth of tea there. The performance there was entertaining, esp the face changing guy, the xiang shen and the two guys who could imitate chickens, birds, trains and more. Dinner was dismal though coz it was all dian xin really.

Eleventh Day
The special interest talk was first today. Chinese folk songs. The teacher wanted us to sing but I naturally cant. :P We attended lessons afterwards. The students in the class were quite helpful. Hannie’s stool was stuck and they helped open it. There wasn’t much to listen to coz they were going through a test of theirs. Rather boring. Next was art lesson. They were learning Chinese painting. This already learnt in primary school so it wasn’t very interesting anyway.
The afternoon was spent in the Beijing Botanical Garden. There wasn’t much to see since the plants were starting to wilt after all. And Jing just found out that Cao Xue Qin is actually a guy. Haha. The only nice thing was the musical fountain. Played nice music. :P
Ate cup noodles for the first time in a long while. oO. Some local students from Chu Er Class 1 climbed out of the window opposite my dorm. Said they needed to practice for tomorrow’s cultural performance. So everyone is like crowding the window to watch them. Hardly any space for my roommates and I to get out of our room. We practiced our own dance too.

Twelfth Day
I’ve gotten a bad cough. Our school principal is here at Tsinghua to join us for some lessons. She didn’t sit in with my group though. I still maintain the same opinion on the classes. Kinda boring. Turns out they have exams starting next week so I guess that’s why we’re here so early. Straight after lessons, we went to the Great Wall. It was so steep that Jing and I gave up after a while but the other three climbed on. But, around half an a hour later, they all returned coz Ziwei was apparently afraid of heights. We were all quite hungry so we headed down to get something to eat
Not much choice, so while Ziwei and Jing ate bread, Hannie and I ate cup noodles. We both quite irritated coz wherever we sat down to eat, there would be someone who would start smoking. Can’t eat when that smoke is in the air. Next stop was the 13 Ming tombs, but really we only went to one. Ding Ling Museum. It wasn’t really that exciting to see.
Back at school, we had the cultural performance where NYGH puts up 6 performances and Tsinghua students put up another 6. My group’s Indian Dance was 2nd. I think we did horribly but oh well. That’s that. Some of the performances by Tsinghua were really good. Their flute performance was really shrill though so I think a large number of people were kinda wincing at the sound. All in all, it was entertaining and we exchanged our souvenir thingies while there.

Thirteenth Day
We didn’t attend any lessons with the local students today. Instead we visited the Forbidden City, Tian An Men and a bookstore of which I cannot remember the name. IT was tiring to walk through the Forbidden City and instead of meandering though all the little lanes, my group just walked straight from the back to the front. Tian An Men Square was huge and we were all hungry for lunch by then so as we walked everyone just spent the time anticipating our destination of McDonalds. The bookstore was after lunch. And it took about an hour to reach. In fact, many of the places we have gone to take an hour to reach. Whereas in Singapore, most places are accessible within half an hour or sth. I bought the comic version of Romance of the 3 Kingdoms since we are doing that book for Chinese next year. Heehee. Bonnie had spent the last of her money here. She was left with 5 jiao in the end. Heh. Everyone did their squeezing and packing into their luggage bags today. Jing had to sit on hers to close it. :P Can’t believe tomorrow is our last day already.

Fourteenth Day
I’m already on the plane as I write this. This morning was spent doing all the last minute packing and all. We left the school after lunch. The bus couldn’t fit all our luggages in the luggage compartment. Haha. The bus trip to the airport was another whole hour. But it wasn’t long before we were checked in and awaiting boarding time. Yu Jing, Jing and I drank Starbucks to pass the time. :P
On the plane. My ears have been completely blocked off. Watching Charlie and the Chocolate factory. Shall end this now. All I’ve got to say is, We’re on our way home!

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