days 47-56: beijing

I've finished my first week of teaching and have learned it's a lot harder than it looks. I feel like I have homework every night thinking of something to teach the next day. Tomorrow's lesson is an in-depth look at slang...like, whatever, so, stuff, and idioms are in the lecture tomorrow. Then I'm looking forward to Tuesday's lesson: speed dating! This other teacher with mostly girl art students is combining classes with my class of mostly boy engineers and they're going to speed date in English followed by a lesson of dating culture in America. We had our singing competition Friday and the small groups sang songs from the Backstreet Boys, Country Roads, and some other random pop songs I've never heard of. I'll upload my movies of it to YouTube later.

This weekend was kind of crazy. Thursday, some of my students and volunteers took me out to this beer garden where you could get "traditional German deer" in different flavors. My favorite was a Wheat Juice flavor that was green. Friday, I went out to celebrate the end of the week with some people and we got American pizza from this place down the street. The celebrating was fun until we left. It started pouring rain as soon as we got on our bikes and was just far enough away to not make it back soaked. And I almost got hit by a car.

Saturday was an early start. The buses left for the Great Wall at 8 and it took about 1.5 hours to get there. I had no idea how hard it is to climb the Great Wall. Not only do you have to hike up this hill to get to the thing, but once you're on it, it's so freaking steep!!! And they aren't kidding when they call it the Great Wall. It's really long. They call it the '10,000 Li Wall' here (one Li = 500 m). Even though it is so long, not all parts are accessible to tourists. My favorite part of the trip was stepping over the barricade where you're supposed to stop and walking on the closed part of the wall. It was overgrown with all these plants and there must have been a bee hive somewhere close by because there were bees everywhere and I'm still amazed I wasn't stung at all. I walked down maybe 300 m down the wall until I got to this really old tower, then walked back to the touristy part.

We got back to Tsinghua around 3 and I had a short nap before the Great Wall Beach Party. The party was a rave where the great wall meets the ocean. It didn't get off to a good start. The buses didn't leave the station until an hour after they were supposed to and instead of the 3 hour ride they advertised, it took 6 hours to get there because the driver got lost. I was in a pretty bad mood when I got there around 1:30 because of the long ride and puking on the bus, but vodka and red bull changed that. I met this German girl and we talked in English/Deutsch but mostly English, but she was from around Kassel and had heard of Edertal and Ulm. And then I found 20RMB (US$1 = 7.5RMB). Seriously. I found it in the sand. The Great Wall Beach Party was fun once I got there, but it doesn't compare to the Full Moon Party in Thailand. I didn't really want to go to the Great Wall party when I got on the bus, but I thought maybe I should start a tradition to hit up a rave every few international landmarks. The music was good, the food was expensive, I really liked that the bartenders would let you pour your own drinks, but the trip there took way too long from Beijing. This morning, everyone looked like they were up all night partying and I went with another girl from Tsinghua to eat an overpriced American breakfast. Now I have about 10 more hours to recover before week 2 of teaching starts again.