China: 1 Week In Beijing

I've finished my first week in Beijing. I'm much less shocked by the traffic and the sheer amount of people there are everywhere, and the cheap cheap prices of drinks and taxis.

I've done so much in the last week that it's hard to know what to mention, it feels like much more than a week.

Wednesday night, we all went on a mad one. The night club down the street had an open bar for 50Juan for men and 20Juan for women. Of course when we arrived with 8 guys and 2 girls, the girls were let in for free and the guys had to pay a mere 40Juan (€6). The alcohol wasn't all that strong but the drinks were actually 100% free and the music was good. To our shame around 12.30 we decided that another night of KTV would be a great idea (it was). We laid for an hour, by which point almost all 40 of us were there, then when they went to kick us out around 2am some hero paid for another hour. Which lead to a terrible Thursday morning.

Thursday evening we visited the Irish Embassy where we chatted to the Embassador Paul Kavanagh again, and the man who looks after Irish food imports into China. They also gave us a good western-style dinner buffet wih wines and beers.

That evening a few of the Irish guys and I went to a lovely lake-side bar district. We just rambled around the shops for a while and stood in awe at the amount of LED lights and angry rick-shaw drivers.

Friday morning we finished our time in BCLU with a quick revision and an assessment. Of course I aced it. Which we followed up with a quick talent show featuring Edmund rappingas Gaeilge, Paul Glitter (Keelin) who did a card trick and an interesting improv story about mexicans in the desert.

That evening all 40 of us set off in rickshaws through thehoutong'sof Beijing on 20 odd rickshaws being driven by the sweatiest, most strong willed chinese men I'd ever seen. It was a fascinating trip, and equally as exhilirating due to the amount of near-misses which occured.

After the rickshaw tour we were ushered into the back room of some locals house where we had a Q&A session with her. It was pretty interesting to get a locals opinions on some issues such as owning property and travelling.

That evening we went for drinks in the bar district, and like well behaved students we set off to get taxis at 10:30pm to be in bed by 11:00pmbutluck was not on our side. We got out of the bar district at a quiet area and quickly realised that no taxi would pick us up from there so we walked in the direction of our hotel (a good 11km away). This is where the mistakes began. After maybe 35 minutes of walking and hailing half of our group got into a taxi. So we assumed we wouldn't be long getting a taxi so we kept walking.Mistake Number 2.We ended up at a massive intersection (which intersections tend to be in China) which meant taxis might not be in the correct lanes to bring us to where we want, also we'd have to dash out into traffic to get a taxi. To make alongstory short, it took us almost 2 hours in total to get a taxi, even with the kind help of some chinese man who got out of taxi we tried to get into, and the concierge of a very fancy hotel, who walked about 10 minutes away from his hotel with us to basically just hail cabs for us, despite him not having any English whatsoever. We realise that most of this was entirely our faults and we learnt quite a lot from it but we were mostly just relieved to be in bed by 1am. Yes, 1am. Two entire hours after our expect and much anticipated bed time.

Saturday morning marked the end of our first week in Beijing and the start of the most stressful and sweatiest cultural experience we've ever been in.

We kicked off he morning by getting a coach to the Great Wall of China. It was the most picturesque thing I've ever seen, locatet high in the mountains. However it was packed with thousands of people.

Who knew the Great Wall was so steep. I was kinda expecting some steps but mostly flat walk, but it's basically a stepped out walkway up the mountain and back around. Sweaty doesn't begin to describe how sweaty we were. But as a reward to myself I bought myself a traditional rice farmer hat.

After bailing back onto the bus, dripping in sweat we headed back to the Summer Palace, a beautiful Palace grounds built around a lake. The lake was filled with pedalos and tourist tour boats. To get to the temple, we needed to climb many many stepsz obviously nothing compared to the amount of steps on the Great Wall, but when we got to the top the view was magnificent.

The palace overlooked the entire lake, which was backed by the topography of the city, silhouetted by the sun. Definitely worth the climb.