Tsinghua, day 2

After an eventfull first day I had to get up early the next day to arrange the last few things before all was ready. From experiencing the first day I was prepared for a other long day. It was but I’ll get to that in a minute or so. With not much sleep I got up at 8:00 to be able to take a HOT shower before heading off to the registraion office to pay my tuition fee. Yeah there are time slots for having HOT water. From 7:00-9:00, 15:00-17:00 and from 20:00-24:00 everything in between is COLD only. Good thing I was told otherwise I might have gotten a big suprise one of these days. Did I mention that the bathroom, washingroom and toilets are shared with the entire floor?

Anyway, after a nice refreshing shower I took all my paperwork with me and headed off towards building 19 to pay and to get an internet account. To bad for me the internet office didn’t open untill 13:00. Since there was a lot of time before the internet office opened I went to get my dining card so I can buy food at the cantines. I went with Sheng and we met up with some people (Juan Carlos from Peru, I met him on the first day, Amy & Rachel from the US) that were also looking for the same building. When we thought we got there were greeted with a very awful smell so we went to the reception to ask if we were in the right building. It turned out that we were in the right building, only we entered on the wrong side as this was the entrance of the student dormitory for local students. We got outside as fast as we could and walked around the building we we found a very small entrance which was where we had to be. We got the dining cards and put some credit on it and headed off back towards the cantines in our part of the campus. It took us about 20 or 30 minutes before we got back in our part of the campus, it’s that big. We had luch and afterwards we headed our seperate ways.

Juan, Hak (my Korean roommate) and me decided to get a bike at the same place my friend bought on the campus. So we walked all the way to the place my friends told me about. It was even further than the building for the dining card and it took us about 30 or 40 minutes to find it. But we did and I bought a bike for 150 yuan with a lock and a basket in front. After that we were that close to the south gate and Wudaokou that we decided to walk the rest of the way. Hak bought a second hand bike at south gate, and Juan didn’t. We had something to eat at Wudaokou, Hak and Juan bought mobiles and a number at the same place I bought my number for a nice price. After that we went to Lotus (big supermarket en mall) to buy some stuff and we started to walk back towards the dormitories. Is was a long walk back and I’m really glad I bought a bike because that will save me so much time when I want to go to Wudaokou.

I just got home and it was quite late already, eventhough I was tired I still had the rest of the night I needed to get through. It was Pamela’s birthday and I had to leave my room straight away. Lucky for me my building is next to the gate so I only had to walk out of my building to meet up with everyone. We went for Korean BBQ not that far from our gate, we took two cabs and we were there within a few minutes. We had to wait up for two other friends (Chenglin and Remco) of Pamela and I was really surprised when I saw a familiar face. It was a friend of mine I had Mandarin classes with in Leiden a few years ago. It’s kind of funny to see and meet people again halfway across the world. 🙂 The BBQ was good and afterwards we went to Wudaukou for good old fashion Kareoke. We got home at like 03:00 and I went to sleep because I was really tired.

Pictures are coming later…