The thing with working, not only in dental but other fields too, is getting the time-off! Lucky for me I can pretty much pick and choose when I want to take time-off so long as I let the clinic know before hand. Unlucky for me, whenever the clinic closes I’m out of work.
But generally I’m pretty lucky, my friends have booked their time-off up to a year in advance! In contrast, I block my time-off about 6 months in advance. I guess it’s because I don’t have to fight amongst colleagues to get time-off, if I don’t work then there’s no patient to book. yAy!
So anyway, I had already blocked out some time in July – August, but due to changes in circumstances I now have the flexibility to move this around. I had planned on flying to the Eastern states to have a look-see around Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and even check out employment opportunities. I mean after spending ~85% of my life living in Australia, I would have liked to say I’ve been to the other states!
Well it’s not my fault that it’s cheaper to fly overseas rather than interstate!!
I’ve been “busying” myself looking at places to go and things to see, checking out accommodation and flights. I think I’ve caught the travel-bug off my 姐 and 姐夫 who’s going to Japan in a few weeks!
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
I can’t help but think of this time last year. It will always be one of the Best Christmases I’ll ever have. Not only was it because I spent it with a fantastic bunch of friends, with an amazing Christmas Dinner, as well as having a heart warming Christmas Eve, it was also the first Christmas which I felt so mind-numbingly cold that it was so appropriate to stay indoors and chow down on masses of food =P
The Christmases in the southern hemisphere just doesn’t fit with the snow covered Christmas Tree or jolly fat Santa covered in furs found on those Christmas Cards. Instead, my Christmases in Australia have always revolved around food (similar to Chinese New Year but with ‘western food’). One Christmas in HK was spent shopping at the markets. The Christmas in Yunnan, China was spent on the plane flying to somewhere I don’t quite remember.
So an actual cozy Christmas Dinner in Beijing was something that I really appreciated. But of course Christmas has it’s downsides in a foreign country, one being no family and the other being the crowd. Despite being used to the typical Beijing crowd, the Christmas rush was completely unexpected. The locals use Christmas as an excuse to go on romantic dates… which is fine by me, the problem comes when the whole Beijing population decides to move around on that day!
So Christmas in 2008 is back in Australia, I’m thanking my lucky stars that it’s not the 40ºC+ weather they experienced last year! And I’m extremely glad it’s with my family, and the extended family =)
I ended up stuffing myself silly (again) but it’s alright because it can be worked off during the After Christmas Sales (Boxing Day Sales)!~ =)
I almost forgot to finish off my adventure to Harbin!
The final day in Harbin was spent sleeping in. Before going to Harbin, we were so adamant about waking up at a decent time so that we could spend more of our time on the streets of Harbin rather than in the hotel room… We didn’t take into account the freezing cold weather that makes you want to snuggle and stay in bed.
We started out in search of sustenance and stumbled upon a cozy Chinese looking Korean joint. Unfortunately the menu didn’t have any pictures so we had to make do with our broken Mandarin telling the 复员 we wanted rice/noodles and a chicken/pork/beef. Thankfully it turned out quite yummy and it was spicy enough to warm us up on the inside.
Having come from Beijing where taxi’s were abundant, we were a little surprised at how long it took to hail one down. Then off we went to the Japanese Germ Warfare Base Museum which is a little out of Harbin. The drive was fairly long, I can’t remember if it was around 30mins or longer, and the taxi driver even had to stop to ask for directions.
The Japanese Germ Warfare Base Museum commemorates the hundreds of lives lost at the site. These POWs, civilians or not, were experimented on by the Japanese army’s Unit 731 (其三一部队). Perfectly healthy civilians were injected with viruses, burnt alive, frozen alive, dissected alive… the list goes on, all for the name of research and science.
It was creepily quiet, dark and felt a lot like a dungeon. Definitely felt some eerie vibes. I was a bit thankful the actual site where the experiments took place was in the building down the road… I would have been more freaked if I was standing where hundreds of people were tortured to death.
There were a few times I lost track of my travel buddies and freaked out a bit… Especially in the areas where they have statues and models depicting the various forms of torture.
We felt quite subdued on the taxi ride back.
As a pick me up, we went shopping around Zhong Yang Jie. They have very nice shoes and the fashion is not typically Chinese (I think it’s because they cater for the Russians around the area). We also decided to try a Russian restaurant for dinner but there were so many restaurants on Zhong Yang Jie, we didn’t know where to start!
My cousin told me that I must try the Harbin sausages because they’re supposed to be the ‘best’. I don’t know if maybe we ordered the wrong sausage but I wasn’t that impressed with it. But then again, compared to the pathetic Chinese sausages (long wieners) I would have to agree. At the end of the day, nothing beats the nice fat artery-clogging sausages found at every Aussie BBQ =P
Watching the Olympics and listening to all this talk about Beijing makes me really miss that place! All I hear and see is Beijing this and Beijing that and I hate that I’m not there to explore all the really cool things that they did just for the Olympics =( I even missed out on trying out the new Beijing International Airport by a week!! 天天听着看着中国的旅游 hotspots ，新和旧的东西我全部都想看！非常可惜！
I can’t help but tune myself into the Olympic events everyday, especially now that we can watch it on CCTV! The problem with Channel 7 is that they give a lot of air time to swimming and other popular Australian sports, concentrating on the Australian athletes because that’s what our Australian market demands of them.
But this time around, CCTV gives me the choice of what to watch. I don’t think I’ve ever watched softball, equestrian, weight-lifting, judo， badminton， 乒乓比赛 什么的 during the Olympics before…
虽然我可以看别的运动，我还喜欢看游泳比赛，diving (especially synchronized diving), gymnastics… mainly the sports that involves a lot of gravity defying and/or contortion of the body O_o; The least favourite for me has to be the equestrian competition and the white water rafting.
我很像北京。。。 我想见我的北京朋友。。。
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On a side note, I’m starting to get really frustrated with always hearing 中国加油，《insert athlete name》加油，《insert team name》加油，《insert country name》加油. My goodness, how many times do they have to say “Jia You!” at least mix it up a bit… isn’t there something else in Chinese besides 加油??!
I thought I would use the Beijing Olympic Games as a good excuse for me to blog a little in Chinese…
BUT my vocab prevents me from writing about just how crazily fantastic the Olympic opening ceremony was! Only in China can you get a HUGE mass of people performing in sync with 99% accuracy. I enjoyed playing ‘spot the mistakes’ during the performances just because it would be unfair if there weren’t any mistakes at the Beijing Olympics… it’ll make the Australian Sydney Olympics look bad!
The Beijing Olympics though, there are some performances which I doubt I’ll easily forget. I especially loved the performance with the mass of drums which lit up in sync and the moving columns which was so in sync that I almost believed it was computerised.
我最不喜欢的是 the order of which each country entered the stadium! 我每次等澳大利亚队出来才坐别的东西。因为澳大利亚第一字是 ‘a’ 应该在前面的，可是这次澳大利亚差不多是最后出的！！My dad had to explain to me that countries were entering in order of number of strokes in their Chinese character… STROKES?! Poor Australia has way too many =(
Anyways, like I said great ceremony. Even the lighting of the Olympic flame was cool! Although, it would have been cooler if there were no mistakes…
yAy!
I think I’ve caught the travel-bug off my 姐 and 姐夫 who’s going to Japan in a few weeks!
