China: Culture Shock

I've been here in Beijing for 5 days now but I'm still surprised and amazed by this crazy city!

After class on Tuesday we chatted to some Chinese mature students who were learning English in BCLU,Beijing Culture & Language University.Naturally we talked mostly about the cultural differences between living in China and living in Ireland / The UK. Basically the cost of living here is incredibly low, or maybe the cost of living back home is incredibly high but that didn't really shock us, I was more surprised to hear how not one of them drove, they'd never left China nor even seen any of the tourist attractions the Beijing is famour for and the baidu.com, theChineses Googleequivalent is actually quite impressive. It has basically all of the common featuresGooglehas - Search, Images, Translation, Maps. I guess when you've a population of over abillionpeople as your target market it's easy to be a big company yet not expand beyond China. Of course exchangedWeChatnumbers so if I ever need anything in China I know who to call!!

After chatting with them for the biggest part of 3 hours we dashed accross the city in taxis to the Olympic Village. The taxis are even scarier from the inside but it was quite the experience none the less. It cost us under £2 (divided between 3 of us) to go about 6km it was amazing.

We had big dreams of hitting up the water park inThe Cube (The Aquatic Centre) but we got conned with normal swiming tickets which cost us a rip-off price of €9! Although water park tickets were £20 / €30 so we weren't incredibly keen even when we did figure it out. Anway to add insult to injury the swimming pool was only the warm-up pool which would have been used for the olympics and half of it was reserved for members for lane swimming. This resulted in 14 of us standing in water which was barely 1 meter deep (our normal 1.2m shallow end would be too deep for the Chinese - we assume) with approximately 500 other Chinese people. But we made the best of it.