Saturday 10th September

Today I had my friends Sam and Sonya come me to stay with me from Zhengzhou (5 hour train ride away) they arrived at around lunchtime and we went to Little Italy, a really nice Italian restaurant not far from me at Pinnacle Plaza. It was so good to see them, I had become very good friends with Sam and had missed him, although we have been texting and phoning a lot comparing notes about our placements, we were all excited about seeing each other again. We returned to my apartment for showers and to get ready as TTC had planned a night out in Beijing for everyone that was placed there to meet each other and catch up. We got the subway but then got completely lost and it took us an hour to actually find the street that the bar we were meeting people at was. We finally found everyone at 10pm and had a good night doing a bit of a pub crawl and finding out about each others placements and dancing the night away. The shoes Matt had posted for me were with the TTC staff (Matt had posted them to the office) so I was carrying a box of shoes round with me all night which was a bit weird! We were in Bar Blue when a few of the guys (Sam, Adam and Reece)decided that they wanted to go to a gay bar called Destination, my friend Sonya had already met a man and they came too. As we walked into Destination it became very obvious that Sonya and I were the only girls there and it felt a bit awkward but within minutes of being there I had been befriended by a group of Chinese gay men who wanted to practice their English and were all very friendly, although there was one awkward moment when an American very drunk man mistook me for a transsexual. The club closed at 4am and David, the man Sam had been with all night invited us all back to his hotel room for drinks so at 4am we were cruising through the streets of Beijing in a really posh car that had TV screens on the headrests on our way to David’s 5 star hotel! We stopped at McDonald's on the way but weren’t allowed to eat it in the car which was funny. When we got there the suite was amazing, everything was marble and so posh. We stayed until 6am and then Sonya and I got a taxi back to my apartment as the sun was rising and it was so pretty, the perfect end to an extremely fun day!