I have been in China for three weeks, I did mean to start these blog posts earlier but time has been flying by! Now that I have settled into my placement and got my timetable of classes, I finally have the opportunity to sit down and write about it.
My journey began with a couple of days in London to catch up with friends and, because it actually worked out cheaper to fly from Heathrow than Glasgow or Edinburgh, it just made sense to travel from there. London to Beijing involved two seven hour flights, one airport sprint and about zero hours sleep! Add this to a time difference of eight hours and it might just be understandable that I made a bit of a strange first impression on my fellow interns… Let’s just say that if you don’t want to be known solely for your favourite type of cheese, then maybe don’t spend ten minutes talking about Halloumi the first time you meet a new group of people. Luckily I wasn’t the only jet-lagged traveller in the group and soon enough the conversation had escalated to what can only be described as over tired nonsense, but hey if you can’t bond with a group of strangers over the classic Nintedo game Nintedogs and British tv drama Dr Foster then what can you bond over?!
Week one in China was orientation week; a chance to meet the rest of the interns, learn some Mandarin, gain some cultural knowledge and explore Beijing. First thing I did was join a couple of interns to a convenience store at the end of the street, this was definitely and experience! With my knowledge of Mandarin limited to “hello” and “sorry”, no existence of a queue system and a 100RMB note that was clearly far to big to be buying one bottle of water and a chocolate bar with, I have to say I have never felt more British in my life! Thankfully, we survived the ordeal and legged it out of there and back to the safety of the training centre until we had a bit more of a clue as to how to communicate with, well, anybody.
The first official day of orientation and with a good night sleep, a freezing cold “refreshing” shower and the shop incident pushed to the back of my mind we headed down for breakfast. I don’t know what exactly I was expecting but when I was met with a plate of rice and a boiled egg, I did wonder for a minute if I had slept in and somehow wandered into lunch time. It was breakfast though and I should have saved my judgements because it actually tasted incredible! For the non Coeliacs there was also a choice of interesting looking fried buns if rice was a bit too adventurous for a Tuesday morning.
Orientation began with a quick introduction about ImmerQi and what we might expect from our placements and time in China. We then organised Chinese sim cards (so if you have tried to text my old number I’m afraid I won’t have received it) and spent the majority of the remainder of the day using the WIFI, reasuring family members that we had survived the journey.
Day two and we were up bright and early for a Tai Chi demonstration in the grounds of the training centre, if the cold shower didn’t wake you up that morning then the temperature outside did the trick, but I would not have missed it for anything! The instructor was quite possibly the most chilled out person I have ever seen. He made each move look completely effortless as he flowed from one leg to another gliding through every motion with an ease that put us all of us wobbling and falling about to shame. He also had the best sense of humour, “attacking” some of the boys in the group to show why each step was important in terms of defending yourself against someone if they came at you in a fight.
After this we were taken to a Calligraphy class where we were shown how to write Chinese symbols with traditional brush and ink. It is fair to say my attempt was not the best in the class, but at the same time I don’t think it was the worst either, so at least I have that. (This is also where I learnt that “squint” is used only to refer to someone “squinting their eyes” in every other country apart from Scotland… where it can also be used refer to something being squint, or off centre as everyone else calls it!) Traditionally the symbol painted on red paper for the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) is done so with the paper at an angle. I was not very successful at this part of the task; for some reason, even though I started with my piece of paper squint it somehow ended up straight again. The important thing is I tried.
After lunch it was Mandarin class and then a group of us decided to take the subway system into the centre of Beijing. I always knew Mandarin was going to be hard but, man is it hard! A few more lessons are definitely required before I can attempt to have a conversation. The centre of Beijing was an interesting experience, I had been told about Chinese people taking photos of westerners on the street but I don’t think I fully understood what that involved. I am not exaggerating when I say that we were, at one point, surrounded by a group of about ten all trying to take photographs of us and telling us we were on tv.
The highlights of the week for me were definitely getting to explore the Forbidden City Gardens and visiting the Great Wall of China. The Forbidden City is breathtakingly beautiful; the moat was completely frozen over and the art work was so delicate and perfectly painted on to each structure it was like nothing I have ever seen before. We spent a whole afternoon just wondering around the gardens before heading back to the training centre, where I promptly passed out after such a full week.
Our last official day of orientation was our trip to the Great Wall of China. The Great Wall has been on my bucket list for as long as I can remember and it was at the very top of my list (after visiting Pandas) of things I wanted to do while in China. It did not disappoint; the views were incredible before we even started climbing, some of the steps were higher than my waist and it was actually surprisingly warm considering how cold the rest of the week had been. It took us around an hour to reach the top of the section of wall we were climbing, including rest stops for photographs and water along the way. From the top the views were even better than expected and I have to say that it was the perfect way to end our first week in China.
Well Travelled Lass 
Very very cool – keep’em coming!