Had our second set of chinese lessons today, we got to watch part of a chinese cartoon!!!!! So funny, some of the humor was lost on us though in the second cartoon - it was a play on words, none of which we understood.
We had to do group speaking exercises with some of our classmates form Didcot GIrls school, they were filmed so unfortunatly are likley to be appearing on the site at some point.
The lessons today focused on reading and writing the chinese symbols - proved to be quite a mental challenge!! The first lesson foucsed on learning to recognise the chinese symbols we will be seeing in tian'amen square and Forbidden city tomorrow. The second lesson taught us to wright from left to right and from top to bottom.
After class we headed to lunch and had some of the never ending supply of chinese cakes! At two we began our two hour chinese painting class. At first we were told how to hold the brush & how to lighten the ink. The our task was to draw a bannana leaf and some random birds. After five minutes the class was haulted - and the teacher asked who had ruined their page and needed to start again . 90% of the class raised our hands! With the catastrophic birds and bannana leafs out the way we progerssed to painting mountains with a rather complicated traditional boat in the foreground. The example painting was beautiful, but myself and most of the people sitting around me had a black mass on our pages!
It is now around 5:20 and the majority of the group are battling through the crounds at the local supermarket.Asistants seem to see yuan sings when the see westerners. You walk into a shop and around five atendants decend on you all trying to encourage you to buy somthing.
This evening we are going to watch a documentary on thr forbidden city and tian'amen square before visting them tommorow.
Mairi
Traditional chinese painting.
Chinese symbols...
How chinese painting should be done...
More photos in album GGS day 4 on the right.
Listen to what happened today:
Download class_repeats_sounds_day_4.MP3
Download mairi_ruth_intro_in_chinese.MP3
Day 3
Today we had our first language class. It was quite intense, 3 hours solid mandarin is hard work!
But it wasn’t only lessons that were hard work: we had two hours of martial arts tuition today. It was surprisingly tricky! Much giggling, falling down and awkward stretching took place by all. Trying to work out which leg went where was the real challenge! Even copying the non-english speaking instructor was difficult.
Then in the evening we went to an acrobatic show. It was amazing! The line-up included an extremely flexible lady; a guy in a leotard juggling 8 balls; boys doing front flips through hoops; 12 girls on one bicycle and men climbing up poles as if they were monkeys!
Afterwards, our group of ten went out for an explore around about the shopping centre and down a lamp lit walkway (it was a more well-off area of Beijing). We also had a drink in a little café. It was very nice. What’s more on the way back it started to rain!!!! We thought we had got away from the wet weather!!!!
All in all, the day was quite tiring but very enjoyable.
Night,
Ailithx
All photos in album GGS China Day 3 on right side. Here are a few:
Chinese class
Kung Fu
Acrobatic show
Acrobatic show
Here some snippets from the day
Woken up by Jenny this morning at 7:00 which was not good at all, but the one good thing this meant was ti me for breakfast, our first in china. Breakfast was very interesting this morning, spreading jam on bread with chopsticks and dough balls with pork in them. Soon after breakfast we had our opening ceremony with was slightly boring but it had to be done. The British embassy and the head teacher of the high school talked to us about our stay here in china. Also in the opening ceremony we had the chance to meet our hosts in china and all the other students here. My hosts name is Zheng Qing Ying, she is very nice and we look forward to our home visit.
Next came lunch, this was a feast. We all filled our trays up with the likes of chicken and peanuts, rice, beef and vegetables and the most commonly known to us chips and tomato sauce. Everyone seemed to by pass the pigs elbow though (I wonder why). After lunch we had our test to see how well or in our case how bad we are at Mandarin. We had a self evaluation to fill in along with and oral test. Both were ok and we got put into our classes. Yes, we are in the very beginners class but we are all together with is the good thing. After this the ten of us took a mission to the supermarket (which still half of us never got to), and the shopping centre where we found lots of shops and coffee shops. There was one slight thing that made us feel a little bit awkward, everyone that passed us stared and some even laughed! But our mission was successful and we shall return at some point of our trip.
For dinner all of the students went out to a lovely restaurant about a 40 minutes drive away from campus. The food was great we had one of the swirly things in the middle of the table which we had lots of fun with. We had way too much food but we were showed how to make roasted duck pancakes after being shown how to slice the duck with style. After our meal, Jenny and I took an adventure to the toilets just to see what they were like, here we met Miss Pallut, the toilets got a 5 out of 10. At
8:30
we all piled back on the buses to come back to campus. We arrived safely and went to the basic shop on the site, Jenny and Mrs McCulloch bargained for 4 bottles of water. After all our excitement for the day we are all heading to bed nice and early, we are looking forward to martial arts tomorrow. Night night
Charlotte
x
For more photos see the link on the right side to GGS China Day 2
Everyone at dinner
Peking duck
English and chinese students
Inside supermarket
Jenny & duck
Here a snippet from the opening ceremony and you will understand just how hard it is to understand people here - both in English and chinese!
Day 1
Well, its our first day in China and the first thing that hit us was the heat, walking off the aeroplane was like walking into a greenhouse in summer, not a particularly nice feeling but we were all glad to be off the plane at last.
On arrival we were greeted by reps from the Beijing branch of the British Embassy who showed us to our buses. Good job they did too, otherwise I fear we may have been run over, zebra crossings don’t seem to stand for much in this part of the world.
We were then driven to the High School Affiliated with the University of Peking, where we were shown our rooms, which are brilliant – they have air cons (somewhat of a must in this country) and even a TV.
Then, we were taken on a quick guided tour of the campus, before our Chinese helper, Stone took us for a walk around some of the Beijing streets, which needless to say are a bit different than anything you could encounter in Grantown, the stench is incredible, and there are street merchants selling second goods on every spare inch of pavement.
And now, for sleep. I haven’t slept since Thursday night as sleeping on the plane turned out to be more of a challenge than I expected, night night!
(Lindsay Thomson)
Some initial photos -
School Grounds
Accomodation block
Room
Dinner 
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