春天 到了!

china/beijing/beida has blocked blogspot...

but blogger is accessible - strange. as well as another useful transfer site =)

no more excuse of eating more in winter...

we spend more at carrefour than on proper meals

Siok Hoon, my stack wins!!

breakfast thanks to our multi-purpose cooker.

i need to learn how to cook :(

feels at least 1kg lighter shedding the longjohns, wool socks & sweaters!

but like there's a price to pay for snow (freezing cold + walking in slush), there's a price to pay for spring apparently - 花粉症 where the pollen irritates your respiratory system.

now now, don't mistake the 山桃 for the 樱花!

-- some zuai student commented as he walked past us flower-admirers.

梅栏竹菊 i want to play mahjong! the fake tree

chinese mathematics
笨笨男人 + 笨笨女人 = 结婚

笨笨男人 + 聪明女人 = 离婚

聪明男人 + 笨笨女人 = 婚外情

聪明男人 + 聪明女人= 浪漫爱情

to zz the everyone-says-looks-bullyable mooter!

dalian is not a big ah lian

headed for Dalian over the weekend !

thurs overnight train til sunday morn returned in time to run to church! =)

selected photos of 大连之旅.

chey! only after spending so long sorting out photos did JD send us some pretty pro pics!

first train ride on 硬卧 (hard sleeper) carriage.
it's certainly not the dark dirty dingy trains we imagined!
旧上海的味道...
they even play you lullabies and give morning calls...

who needs to fly to Russia?

Russian quarters~

welcome to japan... i mean, dalian!

日本风情街

the long-lost cousin

老虎滩

海底世界

remind us not to be touristy

good company makes all the difference!

Siok Hoon, Siting, Yinjie, and our new friend Junda who didn't mind the "ying sheng yang shuai"!

we actually went in the wrong season - who wants to 吹海风 at 1 or 2 degrees?

but it was a not bad first trip out of beijing!

lion city

siting and i always joke that if u finance us, we could prob extend our stay here another sem :P heh heh so 没良心! almost 1 month since we've been here... funny that our first trip out of beijing made me seriously miss home for the first time! dalian is supposed to be modelled after singapore... my lion city!

funny that this is what i miss the most... a good cuppa teh-ping!! (Dalian HK cafe)

and my mama's cooking! this is her CNY spread...(zoom in on the curry yummy)

we were so gian over the seafood steamboat we had in dalian - the rare time we got vege that wasn't soaked in salt/oil! a bit sick of cai fan already...

figured out the story of our room

...李老师在北大法学院的资历和地位... 李省长、吴校长、苏力老师、兴良老师、陶大律师等等都是她的学生，芮沐先生和她是忘年交，她在美国时曾“逼”过罗豪才先生替自己做饭！
[-results of voyeuring the blogs of students u were exchanged with.] i don't exactly know who these pple our prof previously taught are, but she sure sounds influential!

that explains how our prof LMQ (she taught us our compulsory chinese prep module last semester) got us a room in the 'atas' hard-to-get block that everyone "waaa!"s at in contrast to the normal 北大 "贫民窟" or "squatter settlement" just a few steps away. and considering she has taught each batch that is headed for beijing, to fig out why we got 'special treatment' needs to be traced back to -- the frustrating delay in getting our visa documents from Beida 1-1.5 weeks before the everything-shuts-down CNY period!
otherwise, prof wouldnt have called up beida on behalf of the admin, blah blah blah. nasty thing #1 delay turned good thing. God is good!

and then i got quite a crappy roommate right on the first 凄凉 night we arrived... but turns out that she made me more resolute to change rooms (from super-atas 2-per-unit to less-atas 3-per-unit) when both SH and I were indecisive about the options (again, open to us only because of influential prof). we love our cosy room/unit and our nice taiwanese housemate now! so that is nasty thing #2 crappy roommate turned good thing. by God's grace =)

mini efforts to personalise my room.
still havent figured out what 'blu-tac' is called in chinese!

we get one small cosy room each and share a living room + mini bathroom.

pretty atas price by beijing/beida standards, but i like! [oops]

i like staying on campus... it's like a little cosy town on its own =)

for eg. walking back from night class, there are lots of 地摊 selling weird things from dvds (they give out namecards) to stationery to books. anyway, it's more expensive to photocopy a book than to buy a book here. the prof actually offers you his copy to go zap it if you don't wanna buy it.

天坛 temple of heaven

in ancient times, no women within 500m of 天坛

(where the emperor came as the 天子 son of heaven to pray for good harvest)

7 girls at 天坛~

clear blue skies can be a rare sight in beijing.

PSI is prob an average of 100(-150?) here!

i shouldn't have bought a white jacket!

beijing: window to china & more!

here we are in "tibet" (雍和宫 yonghe gong - a tibetan temple)

here we are in "hangzhou xihu" (颐和园 summer palace)

and today's visit - this feels like some "ancient greek civilization"..

(圆明园遗址园 ruins of the summer palace)

the ruins of the palace are preserved as a "monument" to 毋忘国耻...

once magnificent grounds reduced to incoherent random pillars and rubble. it's described by the (obviously western) guidebook as a "tiresome monument to comtemporary Chinese xenophobia". the place is pretty 凄凉... for a moment, you realise why the chinese use(d?) phrases like "洋鬼子". but huh, the emperor take so much taxes to build his miles and miles of summer pleasure grounds - doesn't seem very right too!

look! these are the evil evil foreign troops looting yuanmingyuan,

the old summer palace, while the qing officials are hapless during the second opium war!

but the catch phrase " 中国崛起 " now - the rise of china again is indeed amazing,

prob cos the chinese have a thirst for knowledge 他们 好 好学

- chinese rabbits included!

this is 馒头, my housemate's rabbit =)

she slides around the place cos the tiles are too slippery for her little paws

she hopped right onto my bed!

PKU-NUS swap

I sat in for admin law classes in NUS in jan before leaving for china, and coincidentally, the 2 PKU students "swopped" with us were taking that class! but selfishly got wrapped up in pupillage & SEP stuff, didn't properly host them... but they're been so nice since we reached beijing... their friends in PKU too have been so warm! 北方人很好客... so true!

and then i abashedly found out that they have no "buddy" in NUS (what is LSRIC doing?) - who can help host them? =P

cultured beijing

i paid 33yuan (S$6.60) for my "western craving" pizza, and got scolded for being 奢侈 extravegant!! because for the same price i could have got 10 TEN plates of jiaozi 饺子:

today we went book shopping - there's a huge bookshop (book building 图书大厦 to be more exact) spanning 4-5 storeys. books in china are SO cheap and there was still a 80% discount. i would load cartons of books back if i read more chinese books. for now the target is to find nice picture books ;P
Beijing gives me a very 'cultured' feeling... the way their signs to say simple things like "under construction" or "don't step on the grass", even their campaign slogans for more 文明 behaviour are phrased... and especially 浓浓的读书风气 !

this is what we saw one morning walking to class - students standing in the numbing cold reading. are they trying to keep themselves from falling asleep in their rooms?

there are many elderly folks in 颐和园 (summer palace) who are doing their morn exercise by writing calligraphy with water on the ground. elderly graffiti!

right beside them are ladies dancing so professionally and joyfully, with many people gathering round to enjoy the performance. and as we walked a little further, another old gentleman was practising a traditional art of top spinning (don't remem what it's called...sth luo?)

ambidextrous culture

i mean people do spit on the ground freely, and i've seen pple cutting nails on the bus & even in class beside me, but that's about it. everyone, even the cab drivers, here speak such lyrical mandarin... and all the random pple we asked directions from, the classmates here have all been super nice. somehow i just think beijing (china?) is not what some people imagine it to be!

我带你去shang di

"十块钱 我带你去shang di ?"

???

my destination was 上帝 in the BICF international church. but strangely enough, the cab driver was actually offering to bring me to the further shangdi 上地 mrt instead of wudaokou mrt for a flat fee instead of running the meter. wah, quite bewildering for a while...

going to church in the snow and wind - i won't be inertia to go to church in s'goon anymore!

snowy 北大 beida.

snow in march 元宵节快乐!

we went to visit 清华 qinghua university nearby - it's slightly more modern, newer and lots bigger. but we agreed that we prefer beida's rustic 古色古乡! heh, actually our lessons are in grayer, less traditional buildings la.

the main chef at the singaporean students association's gathering was a 清华guy. chek cooked us 汤圆 tangyuan for 元宵yuanxiao last night. girls, we must learn how to cook soon!!

hua yu cool BEIJING FREAKING COLD!!! weather forcast for coming days: -4 to -7 degrees. heeeelp!

下雪 了!!!

今天北京下雨了, 出去走走的计划也泡汤... 也冷了一天...

但 两位本地学生sms 我... 下雪 了!!!

bear bear, 我们 第一次 看到雪了 (snow city 不算!) !

有 一碗 妈妈的汤, 那就好好好幸福!

world heritage site under construction

we went to 故宫! the world heritage site that is...

boo! under construction!

we saw so many sites where 黄金甲 and running around to find the 金姿玉孽 宫殿 where 如妃, 玉莹 lived... thank god the rest of the smaller 宫殿 are still open!

glad i am not a 妃嫔!

why do their elderly all look similar ?- this cap is still very much in vogue...

咸福 in beijing - no wonder i am always thirsty!

Greetings from Bei da 北大!!

华语cool, 北京colddddd! brrrr... but not so for him??

well, they call this a warm winter

so many photos, so many small stories, so many thoughts - where do i start?



God is good, all the time! most thankful for our nice less-ex hostel after our 大搬家 - amazing how the luggage already grew after just 4 days here! the first night we came here, the place was empty & pretty 冷清, and we got some hostile receptionists and i got a mega hostile room mate and a misunderstanding with her... but everything only got better from ther =)

man can survive without internet

but it has never felt so good to see a "successful connection" webpage! After one week of running to and fro, up and down to get the internet up. But generally it has been much better than expected... of course some things we went one big round circle to get it going... others are good and straightforward. patience!! 要 沉得住气 - that is what one prof here told the class when he talked OT!

we are 冒牌 北大生! so many "horror stories" about how each chinese student here is the scholar from their province etc... they really have it tough. even after coming here, they take 25 credits, each module about 2-4 modules, which comes up to 8-10 courses a semester! and here we are, not fantastic students, here to take 8 credits (about 3 subjects) - oops.... our main modules are Living in China and Travelling China. so happy to have made friends with some chinese students, and contacts passed on to us we have yet to meet...
北大的 一塔湖途 (understand why?) ; this is 未名湖...

so many wrapped up toddlers bumbling around!!

lots of photos for the ilovechildren.org website :P

诗情画意 的 北京

too many photos to load!! the typical exchange student's blog... :P