DAY 1, SUNDAY, JANUARY 5TH
Left the US!! 13.5 hour flight, here we come.
DAY 2, MONDAY, JANUARY 6TH
Arrival day!! I arrived at the Beijing airport with a few other students on the trip at about 3:30 PM and after going through passport control and baggage we were greeted by the program director. We waited at the airport for all the other flights & students to arrive before heading out. We didn’t end up leaving the airport until about 7. From the airport we headed to our first dinner. We had pretty traditional Chinese food served family style. It is by far the most common for Chinese (at home and in restaurants) to eat family style where you order several dishes for the table to share and serve them on a rotating tray on the center of the table. It was good food but we were all exhausted and gross so all we really wanted was a shower and a bed. After dinner we headed to our rooms- were staying in an international dorm on campus. We each get a private room and a private bathroom which we later found it is an even bigger luxury than we thought. The normal students that go to this university (Beijing Normal University) all live with 6 roommates in one room (not any bigger than a single) and share a bathroom with the hall of like 50-100 people. So we definitely can't complain about the rooms we got!! After we got to our rooms I immediately took a shower and went to sleep.
DAY 3, TUESDAY, JANUARY 7TH
Our first full day in Beijing!! I definitely had a rough time sleeping between the street noise, hard bed, and jet lag. But definitely woke up way more refreshed than last night. For breakfast, we attempted to go to a canteen (dining hall) right near our dorm for food. As part of the program we were given a student card with ¥650 to spend at the canteens, so we are definitely trying to take advantage and use that up. Unfortunately the canteen was closed and we didn’t know where any others were so we resorted to McDonald’s for breakfast with the promise that we will eat the local food hereafter. After breakfast the whole group met to go on a campus tour. Though the campus is right in the center of Beijing, it feels very secluded from the city which is nice as there wasn’t a ton of traffic and felt calm and safe. At the end of the campus tour we stopped at the main building to take a group photo.
After the campus tour we had a welcome ceremony where several faculty here spoke to us and welcomed us to campus! For lunch we walked around with language partners (Chinese students at BNU who are working with us throughout our two weeks here). We walked with two students who bought us some fried chicken from stand on the street on campus, it was delicious & very kind of them. Then we headed to complete our lunch at a canteen that has 4 floors. We stopped on the second floor that just had a bunch of stations of Chinese food, not knowing what anything is and no labels that we can understand we just pointed to a few random dishes and ate that- all turned out delicious though!! After lunch we had a lecture on Chinese characters, history, and culture. It was a great introduction and it was fun to learn a little about how the characters work. After the lecture we had a fun early dinner- DIY dumplings!! We went to a canteen/restaurant on campus where we folded dumplings (wrappers and fillings were pre-made, they know they couldn’t trust us with that), and then they boiled them, and then we got to eat them :-) it was super fun to make them- we were joined by more language partners who taught us what to do, laughed at us, and conversed with us about cultural differences. And the dumplings turned out DELICIOUS!
After dumplings we had a short break before we officially met and talked with our language partners. Each of us were assigned 1-2 partners we we are supposed to talk with and meet with throughout our 2 weeks here. My language partner was one of the students who sat with my table during dumpling-making so we were already familiar. After that meeting, we all went straight to bed- still trying to get our bodies adjusted to China!
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