Day 2

Today I had to be up and ready for 9am as we had a half day orientation! This was basically to help everyone get to know eachother, and although it was pretty cheesy in parts it was quite good fun! This finished at 12 so we had the afternoon free!!
Me and a few others had decided that we wanted to get off campus and explore Beijing for a few hours! We decided to walk! Bad Idea!
You always end up going in the wrong direction, so after about an hour in the blistering heat without finding anything but a KFC and Pizza Hut we decided to get a taxi to the nearest tube station and get the tube to Tienamin Square.
Taxi drivers are nutters!!!! There are no rules on the roads! It was kind of ammusing at first, but when you hear a police siren and instead of pulling over to let it past, the taxi driver sticks his foot down and starts swerving in and out of cars seemingly to avoid being overtaken be the police, it looses some of the fun! (Some!!)
Anyway, we finally reached Tienamin Square, and it is Huge!!! Really beautiful place, although we couldnt get into any of the buildings or museums as they were rennovating in time for the olympics! As its where alot of chinese people go on holiday it was pretty packed, we seemed to generate alot of interest and people were constantly taking our photographs.. its pretty strange at first, but you just have to get used to it!
Before long we were approached by a young chinese couple who were on holiday, Han Bin (Who we called Bing!) and Sunting (I didnt forget... that was her name!!) They were very sweet and said that they were going to Old Beijing and asked in we wanted to go with them! By this point we had lost 2 ( a whole other story!!) and there was just 3 of us! We all agreed to go! It was brilliant, just like I imagined China would be! It is just such a shame that it wont be there next year as they will be tearing it all down to build new housing complexes in time for the Olympics!!
There is a Tea Festival in Beijing for the whole month and Bing and Sunting were going to get some traditional Chinese Tea and asked us if we wanted to join them! This I really wanted to do! The others agreed and before long we were sat in this tiny room in the back of what looked like a supermarket! It was brilliant! We tried 10 teas all together and did it the traditional chinese way. There is no way I can remember all the names, but I did buy some Ginseng as it was my favorite! Sounds a bit sad, but was a wonderful experience!
After all the fun with the tea we headed back to campus! Another wonderful experience thanks to the taxis and public transport in Beijing!! It took us about 2 hours, when we finally got in a taxi from the tube station it started throwing it down! I never would have belived it, but the storms are really mad! We got well and truly drenched and once we made it back to our room it was too dangerous to go back out, so decided to call it a night!

Beijing, China