Day 1 of Orientation

Got up at 9am ready for the registration where you pay for your visa extension which the staff apply for and had my photo taken for my ID card (If I'd known, I would have put make up on!) we then had a tour of the local area, we were shown where the bank, pharmacy and classrooms we are going to use are. I had missed breakfast but apparently it was potato salad and soup so I didn't miss much!. At 1pm I went for lunch (meals will be provided in the hotel for the duration of the orientation) then a group of us went to the local park, like a grass park in England but with lots of sculptures (Marbury, Markeaton that sort of thing) which was nice. There was a group of men playing mahjong tiles in the park and one of the girls took a photo of them and they went mad! apparently gambling is illegal in China and because the men were playing for money they were worried the photo would be shown to the police, luckily an old man on a bike saved the day by translating for us.

I then cam back to the hotel and read my book for an hour, it was then time for to do an activity called 'wangfujing' which is street stalls selling weird foods in the centre of Beijing. We took the subway which is only 20p to go wherever you want in the city and the walked to this street which is like a market where there are lots of stalls selling different foods. The first stall was selling dung beetles, seahorse, scorpions, starfish and snake which were all on skewers. I tried the starfish which was really hard to bite off and tasted really salty. Then there was a scorpion which was alive on the sticks and the fried it in front of you, but was nice and tasted like pork scratchings, although I did have to psych myself up to eat it. I then tried snake which is delicious, tasted a bit like pork but i will definitely be eating that again, I then tried octopus which would have been nice if they hadn't put so much soy sauce on it, tasted really sour. Other people tried things like tarantula, monkey and dung beetle which were at the other end of the market, but i didn't wander that far as we only had an hour. It is really weird as the Chinese just stare at you wherever you go and when we were at the food market I got asked if a Chinese couple could have their picture taken with me, which was weird.