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.

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!