Last Day

Ni Hao from Beijing

This will be the last message from Beijing as we board our plane back to New Zealand at 11.50am today (4.50pm NZ time). Then it will be another 13 hour flight to Auckland, changing flights there and home to sunny Christchurch!
What an amazing week it has been! We have been amazed by everything that we have seen, heard, felt, smelt and tasted!
We have eaten Chinese food at every meal except one - yesterday we had pizza for lunch! Sandy and Sue are pretty good with the chopsticks now - I still haven't quite got the knack!
On Tuesday we visited a Chinese high school - it was very interesting to see the students and the teacher together in the classroom. Some things were similar to New Zealand, but a lot was very different. The classroom was very bare and the students all sat at their own desk, lined up in rows.
Yesterday was our final full day in Beijing and we visited the famous Tianamen Square - the largest public square in the world. This square has been the site of many famous moments in Chinese history - not all of them happy. There were lots of Chinese people there, all visiting this famous place that they have all learned about in their history classes too.
I'm looking forward to getting back to NZ and to meeting all of you at Ladbrooks School!
take care -

LAST DAY

We had a big night last night with our closing cerermony and banquet dinner. We were given Tang suits to wear and keep. They are beautiful silk jackets. Mine is green and Sandy's pink. We all had to wear them for the evening and groups performed items for the carnival. When we returned to the hotel a party was organised which was pretty crazy.

Well, what would you expect with a bunch of Aussies and Kiwis. The Brits were well into it too.

The last few days have been very busy. The Great Wall is incredible. Who would have thought we'd be walking on that this year! That certainly was the highlight of the trip. The day before the Forebidden City was also amazing. Every day we seem to be fed 3 banquet meals. Sandy and I have gained a few kilos for sure. On the trip to The Wall we had lunch at a rural restaurant and had 15 courses- then had to walk the Wall! Yesterday we skipped lunch and went to the market and picked up a snack from a street vendor.

Buying stuff at the market has been an experience. Some of the vendors are pretty aggressive. The ones on the road to the Wall even held your arm and blocked your way. We are certainly getting better at bartering and have picked up some good buys.

Today is our last day here and we are setting out this morning for a bit of sight-seeing and shopping. I think we are going to Tianemin Square and the Temple of Heaven, then the Silk St market. I still have quite a bit of money left and David told me not to bring it home!!! I hope everything is going ok at home and with you guys at school. It seems like it is all bad news for the miners. My heart goes out to those poor families. I cant imagine how this is affecting those communities and the rest of the country.

OK, I'm off for a shower then busy, busy, busy.

Nimen Hao!

What an amazing day! The day began with a visit to the Confucius Institute and Hanban Centre here in Beijing. These two organisations are reponsible for promoting the Chinese language in other countries, and are our hosts in Beijing. They talked to the teachers about how they can support students learning in other countries (like New Zealand) by helping with resources and maybe even send a visiting teacher or teacher aide to Christchurch to help us at Ladbrooks School, and other schools in Christchurch! All the New Zealand teachers had their photo taken together - very nice!I was pretty impressed to meet a very famous Chinese man called Confucius. He is considered one of the wisest men in history so the least I could do was say hi and get my photo taken with him!After that, we were back on the bus to a far-away location. It was the first time we had been out of Beijing and we drove for an hour and a half toward some mountains. It took ages to get out of Beijing, but finally our bus was winding its way up a mountain road, past lots of fruit orchards (a bit like Central Otago) and then we were there - at the Great Wall of China!We didn't have a long time there, so we took a cable car up the mountain to the Wall and walked along the top of it! How incredible it was, to think that it had originally been built over 600 years ago! It gave a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside down both sides of the steep mountain. The soldiers who used to work on the wall in the old days must have been pretty fit because parts of the path on the wall are very steep. Sandy and Sue were pretty excited and wouldn't stop taking photos - I just found a quiet viewpoint to look out over the countryside and imagined what it might have been like all those hundreds of years ago.By the time we got back to Beijing it was dark and dinner time. After dinner a group of Kiwi teachers got taxis into town to go to the night market. You will have to ask Sue to see her photos when she gets back... you won't believe what they sell at this market!!! It is a food market - but most of it is made of items you couldn't image actually eating! Most of these things you don't see at the West Coast Wild Food Festival! Tomorrow is our final day of the education programme and we get to visit some Chinese schools! That will be exciting! I'm really looking forward to seeing what Chinese children do at school at what their classrooms might look like!

talk to you again tomorrow

Puji, Sandy and Sue

Nimen Hao!

What a busy day we had yesterday - more classes in the morning - Chinese Calligraphy and then Painting... very relaxing and calming, but we don't know if our shrimp look much like the real thing!For lunch we had a class in making dumplings - like large ravioli. We filled them with either a vegetable or a meat combination. Then it was back in the bus to drive into the heart of Beijing to visit the Forbidden City - the largest 'palace' in the world - built in the early1400s and subsequently the home of over 25 Emperors. It is a vast network of buildings, all laid out very symmetrically. They are beautiful but would have been very austere and cold to live in during the Beijing winters. The are surrounded by a 10metre wall which is still completely in tact, and a very wide moat. The emperors were pretty paranoid about their safety. They covered the courtyards in 15 layers of bricks so no-one could tunnel in!It was a windy day here yesterday - a really cold wind from Siberia in Russia. The advantage of the wind was that it blew the smog away and the sky was blue like a crisp Christchurch winters day - such a difference to the previous smoggy days!In the evening we went to a Hot Pot restaurant for dinner - hot pot is a self-cooking style of eating. At your table you have a large wok or pan that is sunk into the table with a gas ring underneath. The pan is filled with stock and all your food is brought to the table raw. You put the raw food into the boiling stock and in a few moments it is cooked and you pull it out and eat it with chopsticks - Yum, yum!Following dinner it was back to the university to learn about Tai Chi, paper cutting and to hear two different performances of musical instruments. A long but very interesting day.Today we are off to visit the Great Wall of China! The forecast is for about 8 degrees today, but they have told us to dress very warmly as the Great Wall is very exposed and often windy and cold...We have made lots of friends with teachers from many different countries.

They all think that I am quite cute (although one lady from Poland did think I was a kiwi!)

Talk to you again tomorrowPuji, Sue and Sandy

Nimen Hao! (Hello to everyone)
Wow! Sandy and Sue had to work hard today! Just because its Saturday it doesn't mean that they could just go shopping! The day started with language classes where we learnt how to introduce ourselves and to talk about where we are from. That was pretty straightforward. Then the next class was about going shopping... that's when things started getting tricky! First they had to learn (or remember because they should have learnt that before they left NZ) how to count in Chinese (not much point asking how much something costs if you don't understand the answer). Then they had to learn about asking for the price, how to look shocked that the price was so high, and then have a bartering conversation with the seller to try and get the price reduced to a reasonable amount for that item. Well - it might sound easy, but it really wasn't!
After lunch, the students were put into groups and they were taken into a market to practice their skills! Each group had to buy a cup, a pen, a pair of socks and a facecloth and they weren't allowed to spend more than 50 Yuan. Sandy and Sue weren't very focused - they wanted to go shopping for handbags! They also didn't get to practice their Chinese much, as most of the sellers at the market they went to spoke good English!
After a very short time, it was back on the bus and back to the university for dinner. We are eating all our food with chopsticks which I am finding a little challenging - I think I will come back a skinny pukeko! Sandy and Sue don't seem to be having any problems with eating with chopsticks though... guess they won't come home looking like skinny pukekos!
After dinner we had a class about the Peking Opera which was very interesting. Some of the students got their faces painted as though they were performers in the opera.
We were all very tired when we finally got back to our hotel at 8.30pm - Sandy and Sue still found time to go and check out the local supermarket though!

We're in Beijing!

Wow! we really are in Beijing! It was a long flight and I slept a lot of the way. I made a new friend before I got on the plane in Auckland - he's a white sausage dog called Frankie and he is travelling in Beijing with his friend Karen who is a teacher at Lincoln High School! Fancy that! You are going to see more of Frankie - we are going to do lots of stuff together I think!The first thing we did together was amazing - we got to go to the flight deck on the plane and talk to the captain! Sue, Sandy and Karen weren't allowed to do that but we were 'cause we're special! Look out for our photos on the school website - I'll get Sue to put that photo of me and Frankie up.Anyway - we got to Beijing and it was FREEZING and foggy. Then, as the day went on, we realised that it wasn't just fog, it was SMOG - it hung around all day, so thick that we could hardly see the tops of the high-rise buildings! We all got to explore Beijing on our own today which was pretty good fun. We walked and walked and walked, then we found the subway (train system) so we got on that and went to see the Olympic Park and all the amazing buildings that were built for the Olympic Games in 2008. Frankie and I had our photo taken sitting with a statue of a Buddha! Lots of people stopped to see what we were doing and then they all started taking photos of us too!Tomorrow we get to start our Chinese classes. That will be good because it was pretty hard today, Sandy and Sue didn't know enough words to do much so they are going to have to really listen and learn, quick smart!

Talk to you again tomorrow!

Puji.

We're off!

Ni Hao! Today I am off on the biggest adventure of my life! I'm going to China - to the capital city of Beijing with my two friends, Sandy and Sue. We are so excited and a little bit nervous too. We don't know very much Chinese yet, but we plan to learn while we are away. At the moment we are waiting in the airport in Auckland for our flight to Beijing. Our flight will take 13 hours - Wow! That's a long time! When we get to Beijing it will be 6am but it will be 11am in Christchurch, our home town.

Zou ba! (Let's go!)