japanese food, transporting trees and sleeping men on the bus..everyday something new

Vali's mom came for a day to beijing because of work and we had a nice japanese dinner. since I wasn't feeling all that well, I could only eat some soba, but got better after like 7 cups of green tee..
this is what the others had:



afterwards we've seen something interesting on the way back home


yesterday a sleeping man almost fell on my shoulder on the bus...I am glad he woke up or else I wouldn't know what to do

they make pictures of us, we make pictures of them...keeping it fair here!

some pictures of the beautiful campus we have







actually the place with the bamboos is some meeting room for the V.I.Ps, even Clinton has been there. it is usually closed and no one is allowed in, especially students, but the guard was too eager to speak some english with us and let us have a look....such a cutie, trying to play a guide and explaining us what this building is for. being a foreigner and looking different sometimes has it's advantages.

only 2€ for this thing..I could get used to the prices

random people on the street saying "I luv U"....nice!

dinner, karaoke and a lot of soju...

Yesterday we had our welcoming dinner. I think the picture will speak for itself:

I have to say, our university is pretty fancy:



afterwards we decided to go drink soju and sing some songs. Karaoke here is a lot cheaper than in germany and the place looked really nice. Singing songs in all different languages is so much fun too, especially korean pop rocks a lot after a few bottles of soju.




our korean friend is fun when she is drunk, suddenly she starts speaking only korean, but we kinda understood everything. weird.
and being more dead than alive we had to go to class today...-.-#

smog over Beijing

I was positively surprised to see clear blue sky the first day I came here. there are good days, when the sky is blue the whole morning, there are also bad days when you can't really say if it is clouded or smoggy. it doesn't bother so much while breathing, but after walking around for half an hour you can feel the dust in your mouth. at the end of the day the hair gets really dusty and feels weird when you touch it. but I guess one can deal with it! can't wait for the winter and the snow to cover the dust a little bit.

"last supper"

the smallest and the tastiest watermelon ever!

and an other day full of adventures!

our day started with the search for the cesuo (厕所 toilet). we went to a place where they where selling shredded ice with some syrup on it which we wanted to try and they had a clean toilet too. we didn't get the ice though, since the whole menu was in chinese without any pictures. instead we got something really strange and icky, like some kind of soup with rice and beans and ..stuff in it, which I don't want to eat ever again. so the second time we ordered from the pictures they had on the wall. tasted really good.
afterwards we went back home to wait for the landlord. turns out we just needed a new plunger because our wasn't doing it's job..so yeah..we can finally..you know..find our inner peace^^
afterwards our korean friend came by and I went with her to try to finally get this shredded ice:


I could eat it every day, no kidding!

we also met some other foreigners today, some guys who will work as kindergarten teachers. they have a really really nice apartment and so much fun to talk too. one of them is australian and talks non-stop, but has a lot of hilarious stories to share. so we went to the korea town with them.
Me and Soon finally found ddukbokki 떡볶기, korean spice rice cakes. I think I can die happy now since I finally tasted it and I loved it ..maybe too much.


and to end this post..
a few funny pictures of china:
university





and look how dirty our bathroom has been

loo is still not usable and today we had a new all-time low

it all started with me trying to get my money out of the ATM. The ATM made some noises, opened a few times...and kinda died. it said I should call the customer service. yes, sure..I can totally explain my situation in chinese and also understand what they suggest as a solution.
we got home and started the cleaning...first we got the wrong cleaner for the loo, so we had to go to the store and explain them that we need something to clean the blocked pipe. with a lot of courage and persuasion from jenny's side we finally decided to show this picture:


our part of the conversation went as followed:
-"our toilet"
-"pipe" "broken" "many water" "not going"

my respect to the women who immediately understood what we needed. but all the other workers seemed to feel the need to help the funny foreigners as well and soon we had the whole staff standing around us.

we came home and tried this new cleaner, but to no success.
suddenly our internet stopped working too and as I started to think it couldn't get any worse..the lights went out. looks like the fuse doesn't like us using too much electricity.
Valli tried to search for the fuse in the stairway and managed to turn off the lights at our neighbour's apartment, who came out to look what the problem was...half naked.
well, at least he was nice enough to fix our fuse. we had to say "sorry" and "thank you" for 5 minutes though.

anyway...the loo is still clogged. but we got the lights and the internet back. what's next?