Days §24-27§

Pretty sights in Beijing

It's three fifteen in the afternoon and I'm lying in my bed, about to sleep. Why, may you ask? Well, it's the end of month one here at U. school and that means people are coming and going- such as my beloved Polish roommate and a (crazy) Polish friend of hers. So she managed to convince me to go out with her on wednesday AND thursday, which is easy for the rest of my roomies since they have afternoon classes, but waking up at 7.30 in the morning after going out is no fun. In fact today I was philosophising about writing a book called 'What a human can and can't do with 2,5 hours of sleep'. 

A man selling goods.

It seems I can function quite normally- my afternoon-class roommates are skipping school as we speak, and I went to both classes in the morning (writing and speaking)! I also have a new roommate (so there's four of us now for two more days). The new girl is Ecuadorian. She arrived a few days ago, so I led her around a bit because she doesn't have much with her. How amazing is it that now I'm the one taking someone around, showing how to get to school on a little self-made map, asking Chinese people where I can find certain things in Chinese? 

The things we must get used too...

It felt good, in any case. Another thing I've been working on is the extension of my Chinese visa for a month. To extend a visa her you have to have more or less  2000 euro's on a Chinese bank account, so first step was actually making a bank account and 'borrowing' a lot of money from the U. school to have in there for one day. Next step was visa office- since next week is a national holiday, everyone is extending their visa NOW. I'm only getting my passport back after the holiday, and to book & get a train ticket you need a passport, so the chances of me getting very far out of Beijing are highly diminished right now.

MEGA SALAD.

()=)

We'll see about that later. As it is with every official thing in Beijing it was a bureaucratic and sloooow business- it took me at least 5 hours to get my visa extension request done. Anyway, around here we Westerners are getting so crazy that one day (on tuesday) I got together with some classmates and we made a HUGE salad. Mindblowingly big (see the pic). We also visited the (*shame*) McDonalds once. Ah, it's part of the China experience, all of it.

The...thing?

I added a little video of my German classmate, A., and me playing... a uhm, a game. It's typical Chinese- on parks you can find old men and women as well as young children showing off their skills. We are not quite as accomplished. We are really, really bad is another way of putting it. But we have decided that even if we don't learn ANY Chinese, we will at least be able to play this game decently by the time we leave this city. Underneath that is a video of biking in Beijing, but it might be too long and boring for most of you. Maybe sped up it's interesting! Love, Sophie