Ticking things off the list :)

Brief Summary:

• I'm getting all the things on my have-to-do-these-or-I'll-be-kicked-out-of-the-country-in-thirty-days list so much quicker than I anticipated, which is so satisfying! 
• We register in Peking University on Saturday and start classes on Wednesday, so not much more free time left...
• Thank you everyone in the year above me who have passed on so many of their things for us to use while we're out here, particularly Rebecca Bailey for her mood lights and Mike for his scooter! 

A bit of background:

When you enter China to study, all visas are only thirty days until you have ticked off the following things and presented evidence of them to the authorities:

·         Found somewhere to live

·         Registered where you live with the local police (this has to be done with the help of your landlord)

·         Have proof of study from the university that has taken you.

·         Had a full medical examination in the official foreigners centre in the outskirts of Beijing

If you don’t do all this within thirty days you will be kicked out of the country, and I was pretty concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get it all done in time. However when we collect our medical results next week we will have ticked everything off which is a lot quicker than I anticipated and such a relief!  

The medical examination

We did this yesterday afternoon and even an hour after we’d finished it all I was still pretty dazed and confused by what I’d just experienced. It was so bizarre. First you fill out a form with your contact details and tick no to things like having a ‘drug addiction’ and regularly taking ‘narcotics’. Then queue up and are given a form with lots different boxes, saying things like ‘ECG’, ‘ENT’, ‘Blood test’, ‘Chest X-ray’ and so on, with different door numbers next to them. After that, you run around all over the building doing each station of activity and getting the doctor in each place to sign you off. That description doesn’t really convey the mayhem of loads of westerners running around everywhere to various rooms to be poked and prodded by silent masked Chinese people and having no idea what each place would require you to do. There was a general sense of confusion and hurriedness so that I almost felt like I was in a treasure hunt or race against everyone else, we were all filled with an inexplicable sense of urgency to be the first to get everything signed off first, and also the solidarity of feeling like we were all some kind of lab rats.

Some of the tests seemed very pointless to me, in the ear nose and throat section a man poked my neck a couple times, verified that I had ears with a cursory glance, and then bid me on my way. You were rarely actually addressed aside from beckoned in and ushered out, and the whole experience made me feel a bit like a lump of meat rather than a person. It was very surreal.

Aspects of Chinese life that I am trying to adapt to

Traffic and the roads in general

It's really hard to show the traffic travelling in about six different directions at once, but this is a tame example of  the intersection next to where I live

So there are a few things about road rules here that I can’t say I’m fully used to yet. One is that there doesn’t seem to be any concept of road rules. Traffic lights are basically decorative and biking/scootering/driving on the correct side of the road is definitely optional. I don’t know why it is the case, but as during the Cultural Revolution in the 70s red meant go and people drove on the left to match the communist ideology, and now they are meant to be the opposite way round, now it seems like neither really work. Also, I have heard that the pedestrians, cyclists and scooter drivers are particularly brazen here because according to Chinese law the smallest vehicle in an accident gets the compensation. Whatever the reason why, the roads here are mental. There isn’t really ever a safe time to cross or turn, you just have to go for it. My tactic is to follow just behind a large group of confident Chinese people and do what they do, safety in numbers and all that. Thankfully there’s so much mayhem and congestion that no one’s moving very fast anyway.

Another addition to the chaos is that Chinese people are obsessed with honking, and will do it all the time. At first I kept looking round to see what had happened to cause the honk, but they are so frequent and often seem to just be the driver’s way of saying ‘I want to go faster but I can’t because there’s a lot of people on the road at the moment and I’m generally irritated about it’. No one else really pays horns any attention at all, and they’re so frequent that you probably wouldn’t be able to hear one being directed at you over the other ten being used at the same time. So that helps create more confusion, as horns can mean anything from ‘hi I’m on the road and I like the sound this button makes’ to ‘GET OUT OF THE WAY THERE’S A BUS YOU IDIOT!’. I still jump at them but I feel that will fade in time.

This is our deposit, just before we gave it to the landlord, counted out in piles of 1000 yuan

We paid our deposit on the rent in cash, which felt like a really dodgy criminal exchange but in fact is just how they do it here. All has gone smoothly with the estate agents and ours have been so sweet, we went for dinner with them a couple days ago for Peking Duck and they’ve promised to take us for hot pot when the weather gets cooler. The last of the boys found a flat and moved in last night, the group of four had to split into two twos because it was so hard to find one of that size. I’d never thought about the implications of the one child policy on housing but as you are all families of three there really isn’t much market for four bedrooms and they’re very difficult to get.

Some estate agents chilling out on the pavement

Fun China quirks

• China bank pins have six digits not four. Just in case you ever needed to know that! I have a Chinese bank account and internet banking too, but the instructions on how to do that are in Chinese and I'm a little bit intimidated to try that on my own. I'm going to force some Chinese people to help me at some point. 
• Buying electricity is done by topping up a card. When we ran out we called our landlord, the estate agent's husband turned up and told me to come with him and top it up. I jumped on the back of his scooter and he drove down the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic and arrived at a strange little place where you top up electricity. Certainly an experience! 
• The Chinese love fish, because the way you pronounce fish is the same as abundance, so they symbolise good luck and prosperity. At Chinese new year in particular you often cook a fish but don't eat it, just have it as a symbol hoping for prosperity in the next year.We have jumped on the bandwagon and bought a tacky fish pun mat for our door, and we're also going to get some goldfish today for our mantelpiece which I'm very excited about! Also very keen to get some terrapins too from the supermarket as they cost about a pound and are adorable. The mat means every year may you have prosperity. 

I can't figure out how to turn the picture around, sorry! :) 

Just quickly a few other photos of the past week, I haven't taken loads but I'll try and take more, and ask me if there's anything you'd like me to talk about/photograph!

Also, I forgot to say thank you to Josh Pendry, Sarah Kidd and Liv Lyster for making a blogspot account so that they could comment on this one! Thank you for your dedication!! :)

This is our living room in the flat, we haven't really begun our proper decorating yet! 

Some Chinese propaganda posters about the spirit of Beijing , they are all over the underground and street, every other potential advert spot is an inspirational slogan about patriotism. 

Dani, Anna and I with our just bought bikes (£20 including basket and lock brand new!) 

Buying bedding in the supernarket

My room, I'm really sorry that I haven't figured out how to rotate things yet!  Haven't begun making it my own really so I'll show you again when I'm satisfied! 

The good luck cards that people have given me, if you are one of them, thank you! They are really encouraging and I love them!

 If anyone wants my address just message me and I'll send it on to you! 

Just arrived (I really have no imagination when it comes to titles, apologies)

Summary of my current situation

• I've arrived in Beijing and I'm in my newly signed accommodation with Dani and Anna
• Wudaokou is awesome, lots to do and really cheap. 
• Tomorrow we're going to try and clean the flat so that if you step on the floor in bare feet they don't turn black after two steps. Hopefully we will be successful. 

Longer blog entry if you are interested!

I've been here for just over 48 hours and we're already moved into a great flat in Wudaokou which we found  yesterday morning. Real estate in Beijing is so totally different from the UK equivalent, so fast but also so difficult to tell if you're being conned.
One important difference is that the estate agents here are totally hit and miss, and it's nearly impossible for a fresh faced newly arrived westerner to tell the which is which. They are mostly just graduated students in their early twenties, often not from Beijing who are looking for a temporary post degree job. In the UK you might work in the corner shop or something but here apparently they all move to the city and become estate agents. They sit around on the street in packs of about five with a sandwich board, each looking about as incompetent as the next and waiting to pounce on white people with suitcases.
I can't tell the best stories about how terrible the average one is as we lucked out through finding someone that was recommended to us but some of my classmates have not been so fortunate. Four of my classmates have been hunting for over a week with various ones and had some real nightmare ones. One didn't know how to work the search engine which finds houses so Laurence (my classmate) took over, loads of them didn't have a clue where any of the houses are and some of the ones they've been given as options are genuinely unlivable in. They thought they'd found an ideal place yesterday but when they went in the morning to sign they found out that the owner wouldn't sell to white people, because it would draw attention to the fact that he was short on money and disgrace his family, a classic case of Chinese people not wanting to lose face. Another classmate has been living in what he thought was a seven bedroom flat with Chinese people for a few days now but found out this morning that in fact it was a complete con and he was in a type of hotel which someone had passed off as an apartment to scam him. The other Chinese people had been told to go along with the illusion and now he's been cheated out of five months rent worth of money as well as having to start the hunt all over again. Not good.

Ours seems legitimate though, and the couple that helped us find it were really nice and are taking us out for dinner on Tuesday apparently! They tried to make us pay a completely fictional foreigners tax to register us but as we'd been tipped off about this scam we refused to pay it and after they saw it wasn't going to get them anywhere the man said that he would 'pay it for us'. The flat we're in is really central to all the restaurants bars and clubs, as close as you'd be in Cambridge basically. But as well as that we're on a little side road off which is really Chinese, there's all these old men playing Chinese chess on the street and an outdoor community area with a ping pong table, outdoor gym equipment (never seen this before myself but apparently you can get it in some parts of London?) and a garden type area. We're also next door to what we have speculated could be a nursery ( the building is bright blue with a massive rainbow and flowers painted on it) and a primary school. As I pretty much adore any Asian child I see this is ideal for me (please try to interpret this as maternal and not creepy). The stairway in the apartment block is not at all aesthetically pleasing, in fact it looks like you're about to enter the secret lair of a drug gang or you're in some kind of prison, but the inside more than makes up for it!

Since I arrived I've been either paying a fortune for some things (downpayment of five months rent in cash on our flat for example) or getting it for virtually nothing. A trip anywhere on the Beijing underground costs 20p, which makes me so happy because I have felt cheated out of so much money by my oyster card this summer, and it's virtually impossible to eat out without spending less than five pounds, and most of the time you can stuff yourself spending under two. I've been having 60p bubble tea throughout the day and a text costs 2p, life is so good.

Using Chinese has been fine so far, we're picking up lots of vocabulary such as 'pay as you go' and 'pillowcases' which I've not really had to use before but right now are essential! There have been some communication barriers though, such as when a shop assistant was helping us to find duvet covers and then we asked her to point us in the direction of cups. This would be clear in English but in Chinese they are both called beizi spoken at different pitches that I had completely forgotten. That took some explaining, but I understand her confusion.
My personal favourite was in a market today where we were buying some cleaning products to attack the flat with tomorrow, and we asked the man which one of the various types of cleaning fluid was used to clean things like kitchen surfaces and tables. We explained the washing tables, Anna did a bit of miming and then the man's face cleared, he said 'oh I know what you want' and came back with...a frilly neon green parasol.
Which was not quite what we wanted. I'm still extremely puzzled how we ended up coming across so totally wrong there.

I'll post some photo and stuff when I find the time to upload them, sorry about these text filled entries! If you're still reading at this point in my entry thank you for your dedication! :)

Less than a week to go

Hello All! I've decided to try writing a blog for the year in the hope that creating a space to write about interesting things will make interesting things happen to me. This entry is from the pre-trip perspective, I'll try and give a bit of background on what's ahead and how I feel about it by answering some of the questions I keep getting asked.

1. Who are you?
I'm Kate, I am studying Chinese at Cambridge University and I've done two years of it so far. When I started University I'd never spoken a word of Chinese before but I've always wanted to learn.

2. Where are you going?
I'm going to Beijing for the next year, I've booked a one way ticket out there leaving on Wednesday and I don't exactly know when I'll be coming back, sometime after June and before October I expect.

3.What are you going to be doing out there?
I have a place at Peking University along with about ten other classmates, so we'll be continuing our course out there together. Apparently classes begin at 8am and go on most of the morning but hopefully I'll have plenty free time to travel and get involved in various other things. I've been thinking tutoring English would be good fun, maybe volunteering, getting some type of internship part time, doing some sport would be great. The truth is though that I don't really know what there will be so I'll have to wait and see what is actually available and choose when I get there. I basically know that I'll be studying, and that if I make some money then I want to see as much as I can by travelling around China and the rest of Asia.

4. Where are you living?
Again, not really sure yet! I know that I'll live with two of my course mates, Dani and Anna. However we have to sort out finding a flat once we get there and go house hunting then. I'm a bit concerned about having to find accommodation and sign housing agreements in Chinese right when I arrive, we really haven't covered that kind of vocabulary in class and I'm the type that always get scammed even in my own country let alone abroad. Anna and Dani are great though and a lot better at this stuff than me so I think they'll stop me from making any serious errors! I think we'll be living in the area of Beijing called Wudaokou which is pretty close to the university and studenty.

5. Are you ready?
So I've made loads of lists and tried to get everything ticked off, I feel like I'm pretty close now. I never feel ready to go anywhere though, even when I'm off on an overnight trip I always have the sensation of something important being forgotten, so I don't expect to feel prepared. I've made a pile of stuff I need to take in the living room which my sister has promised to help me pack (she's amazing at stuff like that and professes to enjoy it so I won't stop her!), we'll see how it goes. The weather ranges from very very hot in the summer to -20 in the winter, I'm finding it challenging to fit clothes for all temperatures in one rolling suitcase but I guess I should be able to supplement when I get there if I've forgotten anything. I hope so anyway.

6.How do you feel about leaving?
I went through some serious panicking about a week or two ago, and was dreading leaving, but I feel a bit better now. The closest comparison I could make which I've said to some people is that it felt a bit like the last bit of the ascension of a roller coaster, the slow rise to the plummet. I love rollercoasters so much from the ground thinking about the prospect of them, and once I've had that first drop, but I hate the climb to the top, and that's what the last few weeks have been! As much as I love the idea of travelling and Asia in particular, the truth is that I haven't really had much first hand experience of it. The longest I've been away from home is a university term which is about 9 weeks, and I've only been to China once when I was fifteen on a school trip, for a week. That was a long time ago and had an influence on my decision to do the course, but it's a lot less than most of my classmates who have done some substantial travelling around Asia and generally. I'm spending all my time at the moment talking to well wishers who presume that I know what I'm talking about, but I don't really! I'm just bluffing based on what other people have told me. I'm hoping at the moment that the China I go to is just as amazing as I found it back in year eleven, and as interesting as it has seemed while I've been studying it these past two years. Then maybe when I return I'll actually have some stories of my own to share with people and feel a bit more knowledgeable in a non textbook way about my degree!

When I was fifteen and went to China, I felt so strongly that I wanted to live in this country, that I wanted to have conversations with all the people I could only wave at, and that there were things happening all the time in this place that I wanted to be there for. I loved the writing, I collected everything I could get my hands on with characters written on it and took it back to the UK with me because I thought they were so beautiful. Every now and then I  find a disposable hotel toothbrush or something like that from the trip with characters on it in my room, and think how far I've come since then. I had no idea then that it would actually happen and that I'd be able to write and speak Chinese one day, if you'd told me then I wouldn't have believed you. But it feels really right that I'm going now, although I've found it hard to say goodbye.
I definitely have a long way to go though, and I really want to get a lot better at the language and use it as much as possible. Sometimes it feels like I'm learning a dead language when I study it in England, I've been studying so long from a textbook but what I actually want it for is to use it practically and as a way of talking to people who I'd otherwise never be able to speak to. Hopefully I'll manage to make some Chinese friends and get lots of chances to use it and feel more comfortable with the language, right now I still feel awkward talking in it unless it's a good friend.
It's really hard thinking that I won't see all my friends and family for a year, and that I'm leaving all my comfortable routine at home for a while. It's like there's a year of blankness ahead, I have no idea how I'm going to fill it. For that year I'm time capsuling all my relationships here and hoping that they'll last till I get back!

Anyway, I'm off to have my last British roast dinner with my family now, who knows when I'll have one of those again! I'll write once I get to Beijing, and see how much has changed. It feels completely bizarre to think that in less than a week I'll be on the other side of the world, making my new home there. A bit daunting to be honest, but exciting too.