Hi everyone sorry it's taken so long to get round to writing anything, we've been seriously busy enjoying Beijing! I arrived nice and safely on Saturday and very impressively managed to avoid catching swine flu on the plane/getting quarantined/losting my passport etc. Quite an acheivement I think. I was really shocked when we got out into Beijing airport, it has changed so much since I was here last time, when driving to our hostel everything was green and you could even see the sky through the smog! So much was changed for the olympics but as soon as we got nearer to the centre it started to look more familiar. We are staying in a hostel in the Hutong area which is really old and has lots of narrow Chinese streets and it's really really nice. For about 5 pounds a night we get a room which is on the roof, so we have a huge terrace with tables to sit and have drinks and stare out at Beijing. The only slight problems are that the beds seem to be simply wooden slabs and the architecture's somewhat questionable, for some reason our toilet is bang splat in the middle of a quite big bathroom and the shower has no surroundings so the toilet gets soaked. And there's a sign on the was saying 'be careful of landslides' and a picture of a person slipping in the shower which made us laugh a lot. We've been doing lots and lots - we went to the summer palace, walked up the Great Wall, had Chinese cooking lessons so now know how to make some amazing dishes and have been generally exploring and going out a lot, making the most of the fact that a beer is 25p. I've been practising my Chinese so much as well and am now feeling a lot more confident. We befriended two chinese girls yesterday when wandering round, who told us all the best places to go and showed us their favorite shops and I managed to talk to them in Chinese for about 2 hours which was great. We also all seem to get a lot more confident when coming back at 2 or 3 in the morning from nights out when we suddenly end up asking the taxi drivers questions like 'what are your hobbies' and we tell the people in the supermarkets that we are going to be teachers in Jiangxi when buying somre pot noodles and water. This evening we're off to our projects and I'm very excited about seeing my first Chinese sleeper train. I've got to go now but will try and fill you in on what Jingdezhen's like when I get there. xxxxx
