Starting at the beginning...
6638 miles and about 24 hours after I left Detroit, I arrived in Beijing, China on August 2nd, 2010. Through the voyage I was able to start meeting other members of the Center for Teaching and Learning in China (CTLC) program. There are a little over a hundred of us in total, and we were soon to be spread all across the city of Shenzhen, China.
The first two and a half weeks of my expedition were spent in Beijing, living in a nice hotel that was used for the Olympics (there are pictures in previous postings). We spent most of our time on the campus of Peking University, which is the Harvard of China. My average day consisted of:
-wake up, take a cold shower (I can count the number of hot showers I've had here on my hands), get ready
-go on a walk with my friend Jessica so we could better explore the area
-grab street food for breakfast
-go to Chinese lessons for two hours
-have a TEFL (Teaching English in a Foreign Language) lesson
-get street food for lunch
-go teach a Senior level class - students from Beijing signed up for summer school specifically to be taught by the teachers in our program (even though we had no idea what we were doing)
-then our TEFL activity
-and last TEFL lesson planning
-we usually had a meeting as an entire group after this as well
By having all of the TEFL training and teaching hours, at the end of the two weeks we all had a TEFL test and got certified so that we could teach in China.
After lessons:
Our nighttime activities had a large range. Most evenings a bunch of my friends would get together and go out for a long dinner. There was a place that was deemed "Narnia" right by our hotel. It acquired this name because you literally had to enter this building that housed a private pool, walk through the lobby, walk into a convenient store that was attached, and then walk out a "magical" door and you found yourself on this street with tons of street vendors and cheap restaurants, it seemed like a whole other world. After dinner, around 8pm, we usually parted ways so that we could go lesson plan for the next day. We were teaching every day so every night was spent figuring out how to entertain the kids the next day.
Beyond nights with amazing dinners, my friends and I made a point of taking advantage of being in Beijing. We went to the summer palace, the silk market, saw the national flag raising at dawn, went and had Peking Duck, ate some crazy food, went to the Beijing Student District - an area where most of the university students hang out and has nice markets/bars/restaurants, went and saw the CCTV building (look it up on google!), and went to Tiananmen Square. You can see pictures of most of those places in other posts. We had a great time, and on our down time we played lots of card games which made me even happier!
Food in China-
Crazy things I've eaten:
-Ox tongue - not bad but I didn't like how it was cooked
-Duck Intestines - sort of like crunchy noodles
-Scorpions - very good, I'd eat them like popcorn
-Cicadas - ok, sort of tasted like mashed potatoes with a hard outside
-Silk worms - not good - very mushy
-Baby quail - I only had a bite but it was very good, got to watch out for bones though
Really the food here is great. They don't eat rice as much as everyone thinks, it was probably two weeks before I even saw rice in Beijing. Mystery meat is very common. I'm sure the Chinese people know what they are eating, but we don't. You just have to eat your meal and realize it's more important that it tastes good than that you don't know what exactly you are eating. So I could have eaten other strange things but I have no idea. Also, you need to be very careful about eating bones here. A lot of meals don't have the bones taken out and we've all swallowed a number of small ones over the course of the last month.
The end of Beijing:
Well our time in the town quickly came to an end. I really enjoyed the city. Except, it is extremely smoggy there. We had about two days with blue sky and the rest had a haze that was low enough to cover some of the tops of the sky scrapers. It was probably really bad for our health to breath the air there, but we still had fun.
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