Day 3: School!

Today I was picked up in the morning to go to the school and talk to some of the school functionaries. The U. school has two places where they teach, and it couldn't be more of a symbol for how Beijing is. One of the buildings is in the old Hutongs, low, poor-but-sometimes-renovated small buildings, and extremely traditional, with narrow roads and people playing traditional games outside. The other building of the U. school is in the new neighborhood of Beijing, full of shopping centres with for example the biggest Addidas in the world, and western-styled.. well everything. That neighborhood is called Sanlitun. We first went to the Sanlitun branch, and then to the Hutong branch, where I shall follow morning classes from tomorrow on. Which basically meant that I missed my own classes for today, so I followed the afternoon class for spoken Chinese. At the school we get 2 hours of written and 2 hours of spoken Chinese everyday. And God I almost would have given up first lesson! You might have heard how 'ba' can have four meanings (the number 8, a feather, etc) but the different letters are also very difficult to get right. Zh sounds exactly the same to j for me in Chinese, but somehow the teacher finds some kind of difference (although mostly she just says, very good, very good, I guess to keep us from going crazy). It sounded alot like really bad Justin Bieber songs, really: 'wheeeere, where, where? wheeeeeere!!'. After school we went to eat (all together again) at some little Hutong restaurant, for 15 yen each (€1,50). All the food is spicy, some is just bad-spicy, and some is hellish spicy. You have to watch out for red stuff and little pepper-like round balls. Tip: never bite down too harshly on anything, just in case. After dinner we started going home, but then it turned out that a Dutch guy (A.) and I had forgotten our newly acquired books at the restaurant, so we went to get them, which meant I had to see how to get back from the school home alone (he lives somewhere else). Magically I'm home now (sorry parents) but it took some guesswork. See, I only just got my mobile so it had no battery and I don't know how to say where I live, so getting lost is really quite the stupidest thing to do. Well, I have to go now, so some homework to see if I start remembering to say  meiguanxi when someone says duibuqi. And classes start at 8.30...