Beijing!

Ni Hao!
Sorry that I hadn't posted yet - but we haven't really had any downtime until now! Right now it is noontime in Tongliao, and I am sitting at my new desk in my new room which is part of our new apartment building right on campus here at the Tongliao Number 1 Middle school!! More to come about that. I'll start at the beginning of China, when we got off the plane and go from there.

So, we got off the plane, went through customs (rather smoothly) grabbed our luggage and went out to find a large crowd waiting for everyone getting off the plane, of different walks of life. We searched the crowd and found this skinny, goofy, excited man with a big happy smile plastered across his face waving at us with a big sign that had all of our names on it, and "Tongliao No. 1 Middle School!". This is David (aka Gaowei) who quickly has become our best friend here at school. He introduced us to Mr. Zheng (our boss, and David's boss) who is also one of the most interesting and hilarious people I've ever met. David's english is superb, whereas Mr. Zheng's is a little choppy at times. Both of them are extremely kind hearted and great people to work with.
Anywho, we took a private bus out of the airport and into Beijing until we arrived at a hotel that we were at for aprox. 5 minutes before being brought to the train station in order to send our luggage to Tongliao via train the day before we left. Mind you, EVERYTHING that happens in China is last minute, and you aren't really told what is happening. It's just something you get used to. It was also raining when we were doing this whole luggage fiasco, and trust me, the story is ridiculous. But I digress - we bus'd it back to our hotel, got a chance to shower (after our 14 hour plane ride. Ugh.) and we all walked over to a small traditional chinese restaurant for dinner. Dinner in China is UNREAL. The food is usually wonderful (or extremely weird - you have to pick and choose) and it was at this dinner we discovered Pei-Joe (Chinese beer) and Bai-Joe (Chinese liquor). Pei-Joe is actually pretty good - it's a light beer, and pretty tasty. Bai-Joe is ALL Mr. Zheng drinks. The stuff is LETHAL. Literally hell in a bottle. God bless the man for drinking that stuff. Anywho, dinner was grand (more on Chinese eating habits later), we went home and hit the hay.
The next morning we woke up in Beijing and were ready for a big day with David and Mr. Zheng. We went to the olympic stadiums, The Water cube and the Bird's nest and checked that out. Next we took a bus to Tiananmen square and gate, and got a quick peek inside the Forbidden City. I guess the city is HUGE, so we didn't really have enough time to check it all out. But it looked beautiful. After that, we took a 20 minute walk to Wangfujing street - a very famous street in Beijing for it's shopping, etc. We exchanged money there, had lunch (noodles) and did a little shopping. There were a lot of small street shops everywhere - and a small snack street. I bought a little book of Mao quotations, and that was basically it. From this street, we went to the train station (huge) to wait for our night train to Tongliao. The train ride was relatively easy.. the accomodations were small but comfortable, and we were exhausted. We all slept through the night and woke up about a half hour before the train stopped. And there we were!! TBC in the next post.