In NJ

Well, it seems there won't be a road trip with my dad as my aunt was able to get me a train ticket back to Beijing

This morning me and my dad drove from Hangzhou to Nanjing. Well, I did most of the driving, as in back in 2006 :) I guess once you get used to the Chinese traffic "rules" - or lack thereof, everything goes a lot smoother.

I also finally saw my grandma - I mean after she got seriously ill, was hospitalized and subsequently released for home care about a year ago.

I guess I'll be spending the rest of my week here, so there's plenty of time.

Loma!

... that was Finnish and means "Holiday!". Yup, the National Holiday week (around Oct. 1st) has begun. I flew to Hangzhou as soon as I could (last lecture on Thursday morning, flight on the same night), got delayed for an hour and a half by the Shenzhou VII rocket launch and arrived in the early hours of Friday morning.

Hangzhou is a beautiful city in the eastern coast of China, few hours' drive from Shanghai. It was very humid when I got here, and a bit warmer than Beijing. I heard Nanjing is even hotter. That's my next destination. The most well-known place in Hangzhou would be the lake Xihu, or West Lake, a very scenic place right by the city. I went there today, but unfortunately my internet connection at the moment (at my dad's place) is a bit slow so the pics will be coming later.

I also visited Zhejiang University, which is the place my parents worked at during my early childhood here in Hangzhou. My good friend from Finland, Shilei (people tend to call him Chili), is also in there to study Mandarin for a semester, and with a stroke of luck we met each other today.

My tour will continue to Nanjing on Monday, and I'll return to Beijing the next weekend. Details unknown for now, but it looks like I'm going to have to take a very long road trip with my dad on my way back...

A little bit of this and that

Hmm, lots of stuff to write about, let's see where to start. Ok, school first. My home uni (HSE) put some tough requirements for outbound exchange students, so I'm taking a total of seven courses for this semester. Quite stupidly, as an undergrad student, I'm not able to take Chinese (Mandarin) language courses for credit. They are only for the MBA students.

Luckily there's a add/drop period in which students can try different courses. I pre-registered a course called "Commercial Bank Management". Sounds fairly easy, huh? But it was actually an "Economics of Banking" course, with loads of maths. But Chinese people are quite smart. As Bagher (the other exchange from HSE) said, even the most beautiful girls are smart (there's no trade-off) and even not bitchy. Well, another friend of mine would disagree on the last part, but let's just leave it at that.

Yeah, back to the topic: I'm changing the math-happy course to something more relaxed but overall the courses are okay. Some teachers are more open to the idea of speaking English, some are less. The extreme case was one course where the teacher would repeat the English part in Mandarin just to make sure all the Chinese people understand it. However, the same course is also the easiest to pass, because there's no final exam for foreigners. Communication with the locals is quite easy since most people speak English from good to well. On one course, I'm doing teamwork in a team of 2 exchange students (another one is a Thai student from Erasmus Rotterdam) and 2 locals. So far the teamwork's been working well.

On Tuesday I visited the National Stadium, or commonly, the Bird's Nest. It's the main venue of the olympic and paralympic games. I went there with my cousin, and our tickets let us see some of the paralympic finals. For example, we saw China win in the Women's 4x100m wheelchair relays (just follow the Youtube links on the right side). Anyway, the Nest and its surroundings, including the National Aquatics Center (can't remember the common term... well, the water cube?). The whole place in night lightning just look so stunning and no photo from my camera would capture and do justice to the atmosphere. This one comes pretty close, though.

Yesterday I climbed the Great Wall with one of my new friends here (actually my mom's colleague's daughter from England). Anyways, we almost missed, being so late, every possible method of transportation to the Wall (the nearest accessible point about 50 km from Beijing). With a little bit of luck and extra money spent, we caught up with the rest of the tourist flow, though. There we climbed to one of the peak points for some of the most breathtaking view I've seen for a while. The sky was blue on that day, so it was perfect. I'm a bit lazy with the photos, so they'll be uploaded when I have time.

Today they lifted the even/odd day restriction on cars and you could feel it immediately. On my way to my relatives', I sat in the bus for over 2 and half hours. Of course the rain might've also have something to do with it. You can't sense the traffic in Tsinghua campus, though, because it's always so quiet and calm inside.

The national holidays (the holiday around independence day on Oct 1) will be soon, which means a pause of over a week to all the studying, which is like yay! I'm flying to Hangzhou to see my dad, who is working over there. Then we'll drive to Nanjing to see the rest of my dad's family. I'm hoping I'd see Wall-E at some point, been reading the reviews and just can't wait to see it.

Happy Mid-Autumns!

So, tomorrow the classes will start... which is very weird, because I think most of the other people have Monday as a holiday (prolonged weekend because of the festivals).

Mid-Autumn festival (or the Moon festival) is the second biggest holiday in China, right after the Chinese New Year. According to Wikipedia, the farmers celebrate the end of the harvesting season. It is nowadays celebrated by eating mooncakes, a kind of small sweet cake, which taste quite good. Also on the Mid-Autumn festival, the moon is at its brightest, although today was a poor day to witness it because there was a thunderstorm over Beijing.

I've now been over a week here, and it's looking really good. I think I can survive here, even though the language barrier (which in my case means difficulties to express myself in Mandarin even though I can speak a bit) often makes me feel quite stupid, like an illiterate moron around some other people.

I hope everything is well wherever you're reading this. Enjoy the festivities and have a bite at the imaginary moon cake!

Blazing Beijing

Someone said that Beijing’s air is rather poor, which I admit is true. However, today it breathed at its best, offering a clear blue sky and up to 26 degrees celcius of warmth. As it was an even day, we set out on foot. And by bus. And why wouldn't you ride public transportation. The local bus/subway card costs like nothing. Zit. Bus fare starts from 0.40 RMB which is like 4 euro cents. Subway costs about 10 euro cents. And subway is fast compared to sitting in traffic jam :P

But oh boy did that sun burn warmly out there today! I can already notice a nice tan coming up and there will be more sunny days coming up.

We went to a lake near the center of Beijing (which would be the Forbidden City and stuff like that), called Bei Hai (or Hou Hai, depending on which side of the lake you are). It’s a bar and restaurant area around a beautiful scenery, with lots of foreigners. And those little boats you can paddle on (see the photos on the right hand side). We didn’t go to those foreigner restaurant places – yet. Instead, we went in on this little alley maze and found a traditional Beijing snacks restaurant. They serve snacks that in the ancient times were the food for the poor people. Both sweet and salty snacks were at offer, and we also saw a talking parrot there. Mandarin, of course :D

Tomorrow would be the start of the semester, I believe, since it’s orientation day. I’ll finally meet the other exchange students. On Friday we’re going on a tour to the Forbidden City together.

Rollin' like a local

Today I finally met my Tsinghua buddy. If you don't know what I mean, try imagining a tutor, except personal one. Seems like every exchange student gets their own. My buddy is a from a minority group from western China. They have their own language and stuff and they are muslims. But my buddy also speaks good Mandarin and English, and today he helped me get a bike so that I can haul my ass around the campus more quickly. I'd better be able to, because the campus is huge. My legs are still sore after all that walking around bikeless...

My cousin got a few free tickets to see the paralympics, so I guess I'll tag along. You've read that joke about paralympics on the internet right? I'm going to be PC and not say it... But anyway, the tickets are for next Monday and Tuesday. I'm not that keen on sports (didn't watch "real" olympics either), but the Bird's Nest Stadium should be a cool place to visit. I saw it from the outside and pretty close the day we drove from airport. It is a very magnificent looking building.

Orientation day on Thursday. That'll leave me few more days to wander around this great city (getting around is a bit time-consuming because you can spend over one and half hours and twice on roundtrip, even on subway system -- things will get better when I move to the campus, though).

I can only drive on every other day? I'll buy another car!

(Previously on Tiger Returns: I discussed the fact that vehicle restrictions are in place and that on odd days, only the cars with a license plate ending with an odd number are allowed to drive and vice versa, except for cabs which are allowed to drive always.)

In related to that topic, they are now contemplating whether to extend the restriction after 20th September. My cousin says they probably won't do it, because an interesting phenomenon has come from it.

They say that when they introduced the semi-"banning" of cars, they tried to encourage people to use public transportation instead of their own cars. However, as the price of the cars are so cheap nowadays, people just bought another car with a different ending to a license plate so that they can switch cars every day. And believe me, I've seen it: two identical cars, one with an odd number and another with an even number sitting next to each other.

Oh by the way, the gasoline is also cheap. Hooray. To hell with global warming when I can pwn the streets! ;P

Things will get better though, because regardless of the outcome on decision to lift the car restrictions, the olympic lanes will be freed. My cousin told me that now if a car is caught using the lane, the driver can get a roughly 1400 euro ticket + one week jail time. The horror!

First impressions

Hot! Gusts of warmth began immediately after stepping out the plane. In the afternoon heat, mercury rose up to 35 degrees celcius. Dang!

The first day is nover now and I've already spent over 1200 euros for administrative and registeration costs, paying for the room for 5 or 6 months in advance, for example, although they'll return the money for unused days when I check out at the end of my studies.

Lucky for me, I can speak a little Mandarin and understand most of what people say. I can imagine how it feels not being able to understand a thing. Saw a raggae-funk-soul-brotha from Namibia or somewhere looking pretty lost even with his local Chinese buddy / interpreter.

But hey, at least now I've got an apartment (roughly the same size and price than mine in Finland), Internet connection (not tested yet, might be slow, I'm at my cousin's place 512k broadband yay!), a campus dining card, and a Chinese prepaid mobile phone number. Ican still receive sms or calls for that matter on my Finnish number, but I still won't pick them up.

The first day also involved lots of "running around" in Tsinghua campus to get this and that. Good that my cousin who picked me from airport has a car and we were able to drive around campus area, though it's discouraged as most of the roads are blocked and only open to bikes. Speaking of them, I still have to get my hands on one of those...

Beijing is HUGE. But that wasn't a surprise :) Lots of driving to do, lots of places to go... My cousin's car licence plate ends with an odd number, which means that until September 20th or something she's not able to drive on even days (in relation with Olympic and Paralympic games). Despite that fact, the traffic during peak hours is still stiffy, and I can't imagine the situation when every car is allowed onto streets again. However, they now have these special olympic lanes reserved for olympic traffic, which will be freed when the car ban is lifted, that'll help the situation a bit. The other "relief" is that people use a lot of liberty in interpreting rules and thus traffic is more "elastic" if you may.

I'm dead tired now for all the running and stuff, need a good night's sleep!

I'm standing here outside your door

(Originally written: on plane)

Sorry I had to post first few entries and then backdate them, but I wasn't able to do it on the fly (literally)...

Anyway, all the farewells are said now. I'm writing this on the plane so that there's no escape for me anymore :) I'm really no good farewell person, but at least now in the age of the Internet, keeping touch with friends is easy enough so the distance doesn't feel long.

Let's not worry about things that gets people upset. Instead, keep a keen eye on what's coming! See you in Beijing! (Although my plane is about 2 hours late... surprise surprise, Finnair...)

All my bags are packed I'm ready to go

Wait, hold it. Slash the topic. I still haven't packed a thing. It's just Jewel's song is so sweet that I've borrowed the first line from it.

The handles of the clock has now officially turned into first of September, the month my exchange studies begin.

I've set up this blog as a "base of operations" from which all essential parts of my trip can be tracked. I believe I've got everything here, but of course if I discover new resources, as I like to call them, I'll put them here. Right now I've already got feeds for twitter (for quick status updates) and flickr (for, obviously, my trip-related photos) and some other stuff. If you don't like it, then remember kids: you can always skip the extra stuff by subscribing to my blog feed.

Anyway, this is just my opening post, more will follow after my jet lands onto Chinese soil (hopefully runway though :)

Edit: (September 4, 18.28 Helsinki time) Well, now I'm packed. :) Flight delayed for 2 hours, so I'm still sitting at home, waiting.