So yes this has been a shockingly long time coming, I'm sure I didn't have too many people losing sleep over my lack of blog writing but I was intending to be better at writing things than has apparently occurred. So if you were waiting desperately for some sort of news update about my life and times in the People's Republic, I am sorry to have kept you waiting and I hope this blog post satisfies your curiosity about my continuing existence.
Er, so yeah. I'm like in China now and stuff. Doing a masters degree (taught in English) at Tsinghua University, whose big news story on their front page is currently about rowing? That is irrelevant however, I am not rowing at the moment, I am studying International Development so I can get an excessively dry-sounding qualification (Master of Public Administration) to go with my excessively dry personality. I am also studying a bit of 中文 (Chinese) on the side so that I can intersperse my blog posts with superfluous 汉字 like the big douchey show-off that I so clearly am. The feeling of superiority this gives me helps to combat the sense of utter helplessness I feel whenever any spoken Chinese is required of me. So deal with it.
Enough of that however. I've been here a fortnight now and it's all been pretty good, although a large amount of time has actually been spent hanging out in my dorm room enjoying my own company, which has actually been very welcome if a little lonely at times- despite the obscene number of orientation lectures I've had to go to (mostly people from different departments introducing themselves), there's not really a freshers' week here as such, so meeting new people around campus is a little more effort than it was last time I had to go through this whole "university" thing. I've met some nice people both on the course and off though, and had some fine beer with some, and hopefully as I get more integrated into life here I'll get some good friendships/food-eating buddies to share profound IRL thoughts with.
Beijing itself has been smoggy and sticky, but is getting cooler and does have the odd pleasant day with visibly blue sky. The area (Wudaokou) is a lot of fun, with a very international feel- gone are the days of drinking sweet black instant coffee from fake McDonalds as a westernised treat back in Urumqi, here I have a reward card for the burrito shop just outside the main gate, and a very nice coffee shop selling latte within ten minutes walk (or two minutes' cycle) of my front door. There's also plenty of Chinese delights (and, er, "delights") in the approximately one bazillion on-campus cafeterias, although there is a slight tendency for most of this food to be covered in an inch of luminous orange grease. Alas, vegetarianism has quite definitely given way to flexitarianism, with a large dose of "screw it I'm going to eat this meat and I'm going to damn well enjoy it"; I am figuring out where I can eat a meal that is mostly not luminous dead creatures though. And the prices are good, and there are Cheerios, and I don't miss cheese, so I don't know what else I could really ask for. Ribena, maybe.
Here are some pictures of things. I don't really have a good way to link this up so yeah.
And this is the "kitchen" which I share with my very shy Chinese "flat"mate (I'm not really sure this place counts as a flat but she doesn't live in the same room as me so she isn't a roomie. Who knows.)
This is the bathroom. The shower has hot water for 6 hours out of 24, which is the only negative thing about living here (apart from the lack of actual kitchen, but I'm used to that)
Chinese bathrooms don't really have shower cubicles as such; you just shower onto the floor and if the drain is unblocked then the water goes down it. If the drain is blocked... well then. Bad times for you.
This is a step up from my previous Chinese bathroom, however, in that it has a shower curtain to stop EVERYTHING in the bathroom from getting wet.
How to escape when the fire happens.
The view from the window on a reasonably good day. On a bad day (like when I arrived, or today), you can only see the brown-ish building site in the foreground. There's also a weirdly-shaped brown building which I think might be a church that's just beyond it, which is also usually visible in all smog levels. It was quite a surprise when I opened the curtains two days after I arrived and discovered that I could see skyscrapers out of the window that had been clouded over before; I then had a similar experience one day last week when it transpired there are MOUNTAINS beyond the skyscrapers. I probably won't see them again until this time next year.
This is the outside of my building. I live on the fifth floor (of eleven)
The next few are me walking from the dorms to the main gate, which is just over a mile away (think the distance from Wadham to midway down Cowley Road), because my bike was there for Reasons related to drinking and taxis and stuff. So this is the start of the journey. There is nothing else at all interesting about this picture.
This is C building, it has a supermarket and a bank and a post office and a copy shop and some nice people who gave me fast internet and is generally awesome. It's 3 minutes walk from the dorm.
The great bicycle superhighway of Tsinghua university. No bikes though because it's lunchtime on Sunday.
Further down the road, that's where everybody is! The pictures from the pavement don't convey how green this road is- it's pleasantly tree-lined the whole way down and feels a bit like cycling in a forest at points.
We're at the other end of the very long tree road now. Here is main building, courtesy of the Soviet Union in the early '50s.
And here is... a quad I guess?
More trees. This bit of the journey is the best bit on a bike because you can cycle either way down any of four similarly sized "lanes" whilst dodging other cyclists and pedestrians who may also be walking anywhere at any point. Luckily I have lots of tourist slalom practice from Oxford.
Tsinghua number one cow, I don't know. There are a lot of silly sculptures around here.
This is my department! Except there are some trees in the way.
And this walk ended when I found my lovely bike. It cost me 160 yuan (£16) which is cheap for a bike here. It's not very good as far as quality is concerned (it squeaks horribly when I pedal and the handlebars moved around until I got them tightened...) but it is red and it goes fast when I pedal it fast and I have only lost it among the literally thousands of others on campus once. <3 bike. <3 Tsinghua bike culture as well, even the bits where you almost crash into a million people at crossroads with no marked right of way for anybody. This is a nation of people who would laugh in the face of anybody who pulled that bullshit "it takes longer to unlock and lock your bike than it does to walk to places FOR ANY GIVEN DISTANCE" line, and I love it. Well OK, they wouldn't laugh at you, they'd be very polite but very confused. Same difference.
What else? I don't think I really have any tales to tell yet, apart from observations about Russians and British duty-free (they LOVE it, I have never seen so much shopping go on an aircraft as I did on my Aeroflot flight from Heathrow to Moscow) and obscure pride points like discovering a bus to the absurdly far-away health centre for my I'm-fit-give-me-a-visa certificate rather than paying hundreds for taxis there and back. I start actually studying stuff tomorrow, which feels a bit odd as I've had nothing to prepare for my classes and am therefore anticipating a totally different system to Oxford's "learn everything ever then come do a tutorial about it" approach. I've also been doing Chinese language classes which are fun both in themselves and because (for obscure reasons best known to my subconscious) I'm doing them at a place across town, so I've got an hour commute each way which will probably become infuriating but right now is a lot of fun. The distances around this area alone are so huge I fear I'll be forever stuck in one area of Beijing, afraid of venturing more than one subway stop away in case I get a burrito craving that can't be satisfied within half an hour. Doing something in Dongzhimen may help this. Who knows.
Anyway I'm rambling, so I'll leave off with an observation about recent Doctor Who (yes I can watch it here, I'm good at the internets): Why didn't Rory just say "top button"? Surely the existence of two buttons was obvious enough for that to be important? Tchuh. Also Strictly appears to be crap, and I don't know how its taken me three years to work that out. Anyways. Later, all!
