This week has mainly been spent adjusting to China time, relaxing and getting ready to start the next phase of my adventure. To this end, my days have mainly been filled with working on my speech, finding shops that sell Magnum icecreams (at 45p for a double caramel Magnum, it would be rude not to!) and trying to correctly order steamed pork buns (a.k.a. 'little puffs of heaven' as they shall henceforth be known for the purposes of this blog). A few times I have inadvertently ordered pickled onions because the pictures look suspiciously similar, which has been very disappointing. Food here is a conundrum to me because I cannot read the chinese characters on menus and even the pictures on supermarket food confuse me. For breakfast on Wednesday, I ate yoghurt with crackers because on the box the crackers looked like cereal and when I was preparing it, I didn't notice until after I had added the yoghurt. I still ate it though!
My sightseeing has included the Olympic site and 'Birds Nest', the Imperial Palace and Tiananmen Square, where I ensured I said hello to the big guy. I am saving the big sites such as the Great Wall, Temple of Heaven, Forbidden City and Summer Palace until next week as I thought it might be nice to see them with the group. Beijing is exactly like I thought it would be: grand imperial buildings interspersed with 'hutongs'- local neighbourhoods full of character. The people have surprised me; they are so friendly and helpful and will do whatever they can to assist you in any way, even if they do not speak English. One subway worker actually ran after me brandishing an English subway map because she knew I would find it difficult to navigate with the Chinese version.
Yesterday I visited numerous Hutongs to get a feel for 'real Beijing' and to see how normal people live. I came across a park with some old men playing Mahjong at one of the tables, which is a special game in our family as our dear Grandad taught my cousins and I how to play many years ago and we love breaking out the board at Christmas and other celebration times. On the way back to the hotel, I visited Donghuaman night market, which is a huge market selling really interesting food to locals and adventurous tourists, such as fried scorpions and centipedes, icecream on bread (I didn't really get this one) and fried birds nests, among other things. I also saw grilled snake skin and grilled octopus, the latter of which smelt absolutely vile and the smell was still on my clothes when I got back, so I'm doing a boil wash right now!
One issue which plagues me constantly is that I have become lost numerous times. This is very unlike me, as I have a sense of direction like a homing pigeon, but it has led to some rather unexpected events. On Wednesday, I was very lost and a nice passerby offered to walk with me to the subway so I could find my way back to the hotel. During our walk, he explained that he was practising his English because he was speaking at a 'Toastmasters' club the following day. Never one to pass up a speaking opportunity, I asked if I could go with him to Toastmasters and participate in the 'Table Topics' section (for those who are unfamiliar: you are asked to speak for a certain period of time on a completely random topic). I thought this would be a good idea because I have not done any public speaking since Newcastle in April and obviously that was a long time ago in terms of my speaking practice. Thursday night rolled around and I was quite nervous but also excited to do this. I ended up speaking for 3 minutes in front of a room full of strangers, pretending that I held the Guinness World Record for the longest hair. I received positive feedback, including: 'very natural speaker', 'engaging' and 'funny' so obviously my backhander bribes worked!
In other news, I have been feeling slightly under the weather this week with swollen glands and a cold, and I have almost exhausted my supply of Lemsip. When I entered China, there were thermo body scanners at immigration that everyone must walk through to detect if you have any kind of illness. I wasn't unwell enough for them to stop me, which I was obviously happy about because I couldn't face being sent back to Vancouver airport for another long wait. Yesterday however, my Mexican roommate Katherine emailed me to say that she had been diagnosed with Swine Flu since returning home to England on Sunday so I'm really hoping that this isn't anything more than a common cold... If I start to oink and grow a curly tail, I'll let you all know. Maybe eating lots of little puffs of heaven will cure me?!
