Beijing (August 2009)

Earlier this year, back in the summer term of my first academic year at university, I was lucky enough to win one of 10 places on the Vice Chancellor's Mandarin Scholarship which meant myself and 9 others from my university could go to Beijing to study an intensive mandarin language course for 4 weeks at the Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU). Flights, tuition and accommodation being paid for by the university :D

The BLCU is situated on Chengfu Lu (Road/Street) near the Wudakou metro/subway station in Beijing - directly west of the Olympic Village, where the Bird's Nest stadium and The Bubble swimming pool are situated. BLCU is basically a university for international students to attend from 4 weeks to a year to learn the Mandarin language - in our class we had Americans, Japanese, Portuguese, a German woman, an Iranian woman, a Mexican, a Greek woman and 3 of us Brits.

Stuff to note about Wudakou includes the night market that runs 7 nights a week. It appears to be a random mix of stalls mostly selling clothes, but also jewellry, tat and, the best thing for me, books - in both Mandarin and English. Near to Wudakou is a cluster of buildings called Trupark which contains the likes of Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Juniper Networks and others. So the english books tended to be a mix of business, leadership or management guides, with some non-fiction opinions on globalisation and the like. Plus some travel story books, biographies and so on. Really, it seemed that none of the "stalls" that appeared were technically allowed to be there, but the police tolerated them mostly - only occasionally moving one or two stalls on randomly.

The great thing about shopping for anything in China is the ability to haggle for prices. When I say haggle, I MEAN haggle. Brutally. I've read that in some places, mainly the big tourist markets, that prices are inflated by at least a factor of 6, so the best bet is to start at around a 10th of the initial price and basically stick to it unless it's clear after a good 10 minutes of bartering that the seller ain't gonna go that low. They often do go that low however. So when I and my friends overheard one American guy, in the Silk market, thinking he'd got a great deal on a pair of (fake) designer sunglasses after getting the price down from something like 350 RMB to 330 RMB, we didn't have the heart to tell him he should have started at 30RMB...

A special mention needs to go out thanking everyone at Helen's Cafe at Wudakou (find the awful Propaganda club and keep walking down until you see the log cabin style frontage! More on this in another blog post however. It's late, I need to sleep.