Wudaokou Area

The university area which BLCU (Beijing Language and Culture University) is located centers around Wudaokou in the Haidian district. I’m not going to go into any details about Wudaokou in this post since I’m sure there’s been a whole lot of changes since I was last there. But because Wudaokou makes up a significant part of the BLCU experience, I think it’s necessary to touch on.

Arriving in any foreign country for the very first time can be quite traumatic, especially in a massive city like Beijing. Lucky for me, someone was there to greet me and show me the ropes. I’m sure I would have been okay (though extremely anxious) without a guide, but having a personal guide (or a guide book) dramatically cuts down on confusing conversations, frustration and getting lost.

Contrary to my belief that I would breeze by with my dodgy Chinese, it takes some time before you can get used to the Beijing accents, and fine-tune your own pronunciations enough for the Beijing locals to understand you. After you have this under control, I found that most of the locals will be quite helpful if you only ask (although I found that a lot of them lack the knowledge in general).

BLCU itself is in a fantastic location (NB. all these estimated times are relative to Dorm 4)

• 20-25min walk to Zhongguanchun (electronic market)
• 20min to Lotus Center (shopping complex)
• 15min walk to Wudaokou (relative to traffic lights where KFC is)
• 10-15min walk to Wudaokou Clothing Market
• 10-15min walk to Wudaokou train/subway station (to get around the rest of Beijing)
• 10min walk to Chaoshifa (supermarket)
• 5-10min walk to Cinema and (new shopping complex)
• 5min to the Hospital/Health clinic and Post office

Wudaokou is like a mini city center because of the large number of primary schools, high schools, universities and apartment blocks around the area. There are usually street vendors along the main street but if there are cops around, they’re likely to be in ‘hiding’ (standing on the streets with a suspicious bulk of goods covered in cloth).

The shops tend to open around 9am and close around 10:30pm. They are usually by the roadside, but some can also be easily missed due to unlikely locations or dodgy looking hutongs or alleyways.

It’s extremely easy to shop around Wudaokou, and it’s impossible to starve with all those restaurants, cafes, bars, stalls, vendors etc. There’s really good authentic range of restaurants in Wudaokou which mainly cater to International and Korean students, but there’s also quite a few nice Chinese and local restaurants around.

The best way to get a good idea of where everything in Wudaokou is, as well as many other districts in Beijing, is to get your hands on the Haidian district map which can be found in September 2007 issue of That’s Beijing…. err… obviously that might be a bit hard to find now, and unfortunately I gave ALL my maps away before I scanned it.

I can’t be sure if it’s still there but I got the Haidian District Map and That’s Beijing Magazine from Isshin Japanese Restaurant (refer to image on the left for directions). I strongly recommend you get your hands on the magazine regardless of whether there’s a map in it because the magazine itself is a great resource!

Also, Isshin is a really nice Japanese restaurant to eat at! =P

There’s a lot more to Wudaokou which I won’t go into, but thankfully I found a pretty good post which lists quite a lot of stuff/places in the Wu at beijing-visitor.com

PS. Check back soon, I’m writing another post on Wudaokou – BLCU Area Map