Dorm 6

I lived in dorm 6 for two months, in a big single room, with my own bathroom. (Room 213)

*Positive things: 

- Super comfortable bed (people living in the same dorm were jealous of my bed, their's were really hard)

- Close to everything: classes, gym, dinning hall, supermarket, cafes

- Everything was clean, and the room was actually really nice

- It was nice to have an own room, my own personal space.

Negative things:

*Fuwuyuans are really bitchy and strict.  (The ladies ''guarding'' the building)

- You have to show student ID everytime. My boyfriend Ricardo came to my room everyday, so they knew him well. But sometimes, he forgot his student ID, and they wouldn't even let him come in for 5 minutes. Also, the rule is that guests can only visit after 4pm, but they do let some come in earlier, just not my boyfriend. 

- They never smile, and act as they don't know a word of English (but they do)

- They won't come and clean your room every week, they will only take out the trashbins every morning (including saturday and sunday). If you don't want them to come in and disturb your beauty sleep, put the trashbins outside your room every night, or at least during weekends, because they will come really early. 

* The kitchen

- On the website, it says there is a ''kitchen'', but in reality, its not really a kitchen.

- There is also specific opening hours, but sometimes the fuwuyuans forgets about it

I really like to cook, but couldn't do it in that kitchen. However, I used the microwave oven quite often to make sandwich with melted Norwegian cheese :)

* Strict rules
- The doors are closed from midnight to 6am. If you want to come in, you have to ring the bell. In the beginning the fuwuyuans used a big lock, so they had to get up and come to open the door themselves. Now they use a magnetic thing, which opens when they push a button which is inside their room, so they don't have to come and unlock it.
Edit: When I lived there, they did not write down your name every time you came late. However, I have heard that they started doing that now. If you have more than 10 times or so, you might get kicked out..

- Visitors can only come from 4pm to 10pm in the weekdays, and 10am to 10pm in the weekends. No one can sleep over. Me and my boyfriend found a way to sneak him in.. but got caught twice, always the next day when he tried to sneak out again.

* The shower

- I couldn't take showers in the mornings, because of the lime ( calcium-containing inorganic materials ).

It made my hair really dry.

lime

* The refrigerator and closet
- Too small. I couldnt fit all my clothes in the closet, and I couldn't buy much food and drinks to put in the fridge. 

I really liked living there, but I couldn't stand the fuwuyuans. The fuwuyuans in the other dorms are much more nice and not strict at all! They let people in after 10pm, people can sleep over, and they do actually smile.

Now I live in an apartment with my boyfriend and 2 other guys, 5 minutes from school with the bike. I think it's much better :)

The story of our bike

 When we first got it in the beginning of October, it looked like this:

After two weeks, we crashed for the first time and the bike looked like this:

Then two weeks after that, Ricardo was drunk and he drove back home with 3 persons sitting on it.. now it looks like this:

Now we have had it for almost 2 months, and we have both lost our keys to the electric bike..

The bike is really fun and nice to have, because its so much faster than walking or bicycling. One guy I met had one of these electric bikes for 7 months, and it's still working. He bought new and better batteries, and thats it. He had no problems with the bike, unlike us. I think we have been to the bike shop at least 5 times to fix it! Our bike will definetely not last for 7 months.

November

My friend from Norway visited me in Beijing, and I finally got to do all these touristic things! Visiting the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Summer palace, school trip to Fragnant Hills, and bungee jumping in Shidu!

The great wall: Mutianyu section

Bungee jumping in Shidu, together with Ricardo

68 meters high (about 16 floors) 

Fragnant hills, famous for its red leaves

Fragnant hills

Half of my class, teacher in front with the red camera

Fragnant hills

Fragnant hills

Summer Palace

Summer palace

Summer palace

Summer palace

Tiananmen Square

The Forbidden City

My first bike accident

Me and Ricardo managed to crash into this fence thing,

  making our electric bike look like this now :

We got a few big and ugly bruises on our legs, and the bike lost some parts, but it still works perfectly fine!

We have been to the bike shop twice to fix the cables (in two weeks),  as they just burned off!
The battery also needs to be charged every night, because two persons are riding it every day. Usually the battery should last for at least two days.

But even though the quality is poor, the battery sucks, and we are freezing everytime we ride it, we still love our bike very much :)

Someone stole my lovely blue bike at the subway station, so me and Ricardo bought an electric bike which we are sharing. However, since I really loved biking on bicycles here, I bought the exact same one but in purple!

I parked my bike outside of the subway station on the right side, not inside the parking lot (at that time I didn't know that they had it behind the station), went shopping, and when I came back my bike was gone. I thought that they had just moved it somewhere (they usually move it to a place where you have to pay 5 jiao for keeping it there), but I couldn't find it anywhere! I even bought the best lock, which cost 50 yuan.
But as we all say; its China. I was kinda expecting it to happen.

old bike

new bike

Our new electric bike was bought second hand from a friend who had used it for only 1 week. It cost originally 2600 yuan, but we bought it for 2000 yuan. The bike is one of the fastests on the market, goes 45km/h, but the breaks are really bad, and we have to charge the battery every other day! 

Inner Mongolia

During the ''Golden week'', (Chinese national day- one week long break), me and my friends went to Inner Mongolia! We booked our trip at Happy Holiday, and travelled by bus.

The first day we visited some temples and caves in Shanxi province, and slept in a quite nice 2 star hotel. The food was bad and the weather was cold, but we had a lot of fun :)

The Hanging Temple in Mountain Heng (491 AD)

The second day we went to the grassland. We rode horses, saw how sheeps got slaughtered, experienced mongolian wrestling and horse racing, and saw some dancing and singing performances. The whole time we were freezing our ass off, and I was wondering how I was going to survive one night in the ''luxury yurt''. Thanks to Mongolian baijiu ( over 50% alcohol), we got some warmth in the body. Sadly, I didn't drink enough, so when we went to bed, I couldn't sleep at all because of the coldness! 

''Luxury yurt''..

Jun and a mongolian wrestler

Keeping us warm with baijiu and beer

Inside the luxury yurt

the toilet without hot water ( some yurts didn't even have water)

The third day we had lunch in Hohhot city, then we went to the desert.

Hohhot city

Lots of camels

Sand sliding

Another nice 2 star hotel. Muuuch better than the luxury yurt!!

We practically became vegetarians, eating dishes without meat for 3 days!

Happy Holiday tour group

Museum in Hohhot

The last day we went to a museum in Hohhot city, ate lunch, and then started on our way back to Beijing. We came back to campus at 22.00. I have no idrea how long time it took from Inner Mongolia back to Beijing, because I completely lost track of time during the whole trip! I just know that we were sitting in the bus for way too many hours. Travel to Inner Mongolia was a really nice experience, a cold one, but still nice. However, if I ever decide to go there again, I would definetely go there during summer or early autumn. October is too cold! I brought my Norwegian woolen socks and underwear with me, but I was still freezing!

Our tour guide, which we named Happy..

Traffic jam on our way back to Beijing