Halloween!

We had a Halloween theme at work yesterday. Telling ghost stories and dressing up like monsters, the kids loved it. Got a picture of the whole staff here! But keeping 30 kids busy for 2 hours is kinda energy draining so after work we went out to YEN party which is one of the biggest party events in Beijing. Yen party theme was of course Halloween costumes and everybody was dressed up!

The party was held in a old factory and there were thousands of people. We had VIP tickets that got us into a place where we had a own table and could buy drinks without queuing . When we came out of the party at 4 a'clock AM it had started snowing. By the morning Beijing was totally covered in snow!

I was suppose to have work this morning so me and Tom were not very delighted when we got up in a "slight" hangover. Luckily the snowstorm got our work cancelled so we went to IKEA to had a craft dinner! 20 meatballs with fresh salmon!

Pictures: From my balcony, at work and Yen Party

Back in Beijing

I had a HSK test yesterday. HSK is like a TOFL or IELT test but in Chinese. There are 140 questions, one part is listening, the other part is reading some texts and then answering A, B, C or D. Very much like our english exams in Finland.

The test was really hard, i didn't understand much of the texts and guessed most of the answers, felt really stupid after it...

The day before exams i felt really good about my chinese because i was able to talk for 2 hours in the plane with a chinese woman sitting next to me. She was on a business trip to Beijing for the weekend.

Apart from this there hasn't been much going on, most of the days at work after school and then gym...This weekend there is a huge Halloween party in Beijing and i got VIP tickets for it, will be wild!

Shanghai - The Bund

My hotel was a 4 star located pretty much in the center of the city, just a 10 minute walk from the Nanjing road. Nanjing road is the biggest shopping street in Shanghai and it has been so for the last 100 years or something. However, this place is more like a tourist attraction place where you have to pay your ass of...

Millions of people pass Nanjing road daily, the subway here is connected to many other lines in the city, hence the mass of people.

Also a picture of the famous Danchaofan! Niko, i bet you want a taste, it beats the French Le Vin!

Shanghai - Where it all began

Back in Shanghai...somehow it doesn't just feel like before. This city is so much huger now than it was 2 years ago. New skyscrapers in every corner and prices have also gone up a lot...The view from the Bund is still cool and they are really making efforts in this city because of the World Expo here next year in May. Maybe i'll come by and check it, Finland is suppose to have a pretty interesting building done for that expo but it's not done yet so we'll see about that later.

I went to see Ghana who is a old classmate of mine from Mongolia today. He lives at Min Yao Lu where i and Niko used to live before. Min Yao Lu had also grown, there were a dozens of new buildings just opposite our old apartment, before there used to be a shabby swamp...

When at Min Yao Lu i had to go and check out the Fried Rice guy who pretty much made a third of all the dinners we had with Niko back in the days. The guy who makes it is a 1 eyed man in his forties and he remembered me! He even remembered the exact ingredients i used to take 2 years ago! Not a bad memory...Picture of him!

I kinda prefer Beijing at the moment, there are districts for everything in Beijing and it's much easier to get what you want there(Wudaokou, Sanlitun, Hohai, Xidan etc etc). It's also a lot cleaner n Beijing, Shanghai has crap here and there on the ground and the environment is full of half build old houses and half build new houses...People still throw trash out of the buss and car windows in Shanghai, this is something that really seldom happens in Beijing...

Damn work

Finally friday but it also means work. Hyan got 2 VIP tickets to Beyonce concert today but i couldn't go because i had work. Was so pisst off, would have been so cool to see the show...Ticket had costed 130 euros but but, when u gotta work you gotta work...

Tomorrow I'm going to Shanghai, my plane leave as 8 so it's a very early wake up...I better start packing my bag and get to sleep.

Soon to good old Min Yao Lu!! :) Have to check it out for old nostalgic memories...

The human test subject

Today i went to the hospital for foreigners where they check that everything is ok with you. You have to do these test in order to get a resident Visa. I need the resident visa for multiple entries in and out of China because I'm coming to Finland in the Christmas.

The place is located FAR away from downtown and there are no signs that can take you to this place either. It's like they don't want people to find that place...It's located north west of Beijing in the middle of nowhere. No subways goes there and you probably have to change a few busses if you want to go with public transportation to that place.

Luckily we have a car and found it pretty easily with Google Earths help :)

The first thing i had to do was fill in a formula where they asked about my health. On the first page i had to answer if i had AIDS, cancer, pregnant, this and that diseases etc (20 listed). On the second page i had to fill in if I've been in contact with any sick people lately and which cities I've been to (because of pigflue). After i had stated that I'm in perfect condition i paid the fee 346 kuai (about 35 euros) and then the test began!

There are 6 rooms i had to go into:

1. Blood test

2. X-Ray my chest

3. EKG (i think they measure something with the heart)

4. Eye sight (yes i was again diagnosed as colorblind)

5. Blood pressure and the doctor asking about previous operations (my right arm)

6. Weight + length

It was really smooth and professional and only took me max 20 minutes. The result will be mailed home to me in about 1 week and then i can apply for my new Visa.

I signed up to the gym today! First time in 1 month, i already started feeling fat. They also have a Sauna here, main reason why i signed up here. The gym is really exclusive and costed me 33 euros a month which is pretty much for China. At least no one should steal the stuff from my locker.

Great succes, I'm finally settled down. Own place to stay, signed up to the gym, daily routines. Just what I've needed the last 2 months....

I found a picture on the internet of this place. Picture is probably taken from my building, this is sort of how it looks here.

Winter 0->100

Beijing became cold in one night. Last week i was still wearing shorts and slippers when i went to school. Today I'm wearing a winter jacket and gloves in the morning when i go to school.

It was the same thing in the spring, summer came suddenly, one day winter jacket, next day shorts. The autumn and spring periods here are not like in Finland. It is either cold or hot when the season change...

Right now the mornings are around 9 degrees and days around 20...This might not seem that cold but 9 degrees feels much colder here than Finland because of the super dry air!

I love the weather here compared to the finnish winter, Finland is too cold, too dark and too wet!

I'm going to Shanghai this weekend to meet some old friends and check a job. It's been a "long" time since i traveled last time...

I went to the Old Summer Palace ruins a while ago. The allied forces (France, England ,Spain) are the ones who burned and destroyed this place. They also looted most of the treasures from the palace. How come Chinese like foreigners after all the stuff we done?

Moved house

I just moved to this new apartment! Moving took only 1h which is so far my record time in moving to another place! :)

This place is nice and cozy and close to work and school. I could actually take the bike and ride to school in 20 min or so but the traffic...

I don't have any pictures of this place yet because i still haven't had time to go and buy a new battery for the camera...will be uploaded later.

Yesterday one of my friends from Nanjing came to Beijing for a weekend, it was her schools ERASMUS meeting. We went to eat together with her friends some very spicy chinese hotpot restaurant. On my way home from the restaurant i puked after getting out of the subway, i have no idea why, it was just suddenly. Must have been something i ate that day. Later that evening I felt like i was getting some kind of fever but today morning when i woke up everything was fine. Not going to school today, just study all those things at home instead and get some sleep.

One of my colleagues is in Africa now which means a lot more work for me. I guess i'll be working almost everyday this week from 17-21. Gives to time to study in the daytime and nice money! I actually get more paid in China than i get in Finland. Here it's 15 euros an hour and on Luottokunta i got around 13. Besides, there are no taxes i need to pay here...Not to mention the cheaper living costs...

Last week we had a really cool car that we borrowed from a anonymous source, V8 Jeep with a 5,7L engine. Nice! Really felt like a king of the road sitting up there, it was huge!

Back online!

I installed a program called Tunnelblick on my computer and now i can access any site I want! Facebook, this blog etc, great to be online again, screw you chinese firewall! It's all thanks to another finnish guy who also lives here in Beijing. Having the firewall cracked only costs me 5 dollars a month so it's a very decent price! Makes life so much easier :)

Yesterday my bed arrived to the new flat and I should move this weekend. Probably tomorrow because i got work in just 3 hours and it takes me a long time to go there. Also, today there are gonna be some parties and my friend from Nanjing will come to Beijing for some school re-union.

Some pictures from the balcony: a beautiful morning, sun is shining, no pollution clouds and the mountains in the background...

Where is my bed?!?!

Every morning up at 6.15 and then I arrive at 8 in class. The classes have become pretty intensive, every day there are around 40 new words. Hardest part is to remember how to write them in Chinese. Another problem is remembering how to write them 1 week later...But it's going pretty good. I´m learning more and more every day. Listening to Chinese has also become easier, I can understand bigger parts of conversations now and I´m able to get something from the TV and Radio.

Facebook, youtube and my blog is STILL blocked even though the national day is over. I was hoping in vain that they would open it after the Chinese national holidays. It was really great to just chill out for 9 days. Now i barely have time to sleep more than 6 hours a day.

I ordered a bed last week which was suppose to arrive in 5-6 days but no bed yet. I can't move into the new place without having anything to sleep on...But when i get there my distance to school and work will be cut by half and then I have more time to sleep and less time spent in subways and busses :)

The English teaching job is nice, more and more students are signing up and I'm able to get some kind of salary of it already. Pays the food and much more!

It's still warm here, mornings are 10 degrees but in the daytime around 23 degrees. I still enjoy a Finnish kind of summer. I heard that it's wet, cold and partly snowy back there...not very inviting...Hopefully the Christmas will be snowy and cold when i come the 22nd!

There was a funny bad in Wallmart, go strong bones!

Sanlitun

Some people still enjoy their holidays but not me. Our school started on saturday and goes on the whole weekend. Today i've been studying at home all day but then a finnish friend of mine called in the evening and i went eating with him. After the food we went to have 3 beers to talk about this and that. After some good 2h chat and catching up about Finland we left the bar.

Outside the bar was a huge horde of people and we immediately knew something was going on there...I asked another foreign guy who stood beside the people horde what's happening here because there were a lot of western people. He said that 10 guards came to beat up a western guy and then kicked him while he was lying on the ground...I have no idea what this guy had done but whatever it was it's pretty brutal to have 10 guys kicking one guy in the ground. Something about some quarreling with a Chinese guy, dunno about what. When other foreigners saw Chinese guards beating him up they rushed to help and the guards stopped beating him.

A little while later the police came and almost threw the guy who was bloody into the car and left with the sirens on. I don't think there will ever be any mention about this in the paper and i will probably not know what happened to this guy or what he did. This is just an example what might happen in China if you don't play by the rules....

Personally i never had any problems with anything anywhere here. I've been in many different cities and everybody is always super friendly. I'm pretty curious what might have triggered this whole situation...Will write about it if anything comes up.

The guy either:

- Sold drugs

- Did something to some girl in a bar

- Beat some Chinese guy in the bar

- Stole something from a bar

The way to School

Every morning i have to wake up at 6 because it's a long way to school...In the morning there are a lot of old people doing TAI CHI in the street and parks. I got some pictures from my own backyards oldies, looks pretty cool when they do it. I take 2 busses and then a subway to get from school. The 3 huge mushroom looking buildings are the subway station and it's also a huge shopping mall. After taking the subway i use my bike to school the last 10 minutes. The traffic in the morning is always chaotic but it has it's own charm :)

Still feel really bad about the plane tickets....

Baka Seba

Today i just sat home studying and checking hotels for Husse and some other people who are coming here in January :) Later on in the evening we went out with Hyans family to eat and met their old classmates, food was once again really good and the restaurant nice! Took a evening picture of the TV tower, it's 405m tall and looks nice in the evening.

I ordered tickets to Finland for the Christmas last week! Awesome, i will be seeing all of you guys in about 2 months from now!

Yesterday my mom sent me a mail that our return tickets was for the wrong date, i thought it must be some mistake. But when i checked the tickets myself she was of course right, mom always is. My intention was to come to Finland 22.12-30.12.2009. But the tickets i had got was from 22.12-30.1.2010! Congratulations Seba (your so stupid)! The tickets are non refundable and non changeable... Ajaj, when i got to know this my guts made a knot and i felt like the biggest idiot ever. Now i bought new tickets on the right day to go back to China 30.12.2009. But that cost me an extra 639 euros for 2 persons, so far my biggest and most expensive mistake with tickets.

I might just buy a ticket to Finland in the end of January on 26.1.2010-30.1.2010 and come for a 4 day weekend or something so that my mistake wouldn't totally go to waste :) BAKA BAKA!

Turandot

I made it to Turandot this time. The stage was huge on the Olympic Stadium (picture) and there were about 20.000 people watching it. The actors were all Chinese but they sang in Italian. The songs were subtitled in Chinese so i could only understand some of it. If it wasn't for my awesome translator Hyan i would probably not have understood the show at all. I don't have any pictures because i lost the battery of my camera last week while partying in Sanlitun Village. We left the Turandot just before it ended to avoid the Huge crowd, otherwise it would have been impossible to catch a cab.

After Turnadot it was time for Karaoke and clubbing! Went to Karaoke with some British friends of mine, after 3 hours of jolly singing we went to a club called XIU. XIU is a really fancy club in the center of Beijing, no to mention expensive. It's decorated old fashioned Chinese and looks really cool, some pics.
We found a table witch still had half-full glasses of drinks because some people before us had not finished them. My broke ass British friends saw it as an opportunity to get free drinks so they poured all the half full drinks into their own glasses. So Finnish teenager stuff :D

After Xiu we went to China Doll for some dancing but it was really smoky there. We inhaled to lovely fumes of smoke for about an hour and then went to McDonalds. Outside McDonalds i stepped on some dogshit or some other shit and now the car, carpet and my shoes smells like hell. Got some cleaning to do...

All in all a very great night out in the city that never sleeps, Beijing!

TIC - This is China

The day started well, we went out with Hyan's family to do some barbecuing outside the city. Traffic wasn't that bad and we got there in a fair 2 hours. The scenery there wasn't that great thought...A small little lake full of trash and other crap. The food was really great though, Su Dun made excellent chicken wings and Hyan awesome banana-chocolate dessert (thanks for teaching us that last year in Turku Dani!)

At the barbecue area a lot of Chinese were sitting and fishing, we also got ourselves a fishing net and caught 3 small fishes. We put the poor fishes in a bottle without a lid (dunno who lost the lid). When we came home the fishes were just mysteriously gone from the bottle...Maybe they escaped from the trunk of the car somehow, dunno, TIC.

Sucky part of the day:
Got tickets to TULANDO in the Olympic Stadium in Beijing today 19:30. I was also suppose to go to work today from 18-21 but i didn't want to miss the musical because the tickets were worth around 60 euro. I called some friends of mine here and one Swedish guy was able to go to my job and do the job, i promised to pay him 450 kuai later. YES! Now i had a free day and can go watch Tulandooooo!

When arriving to the Olympic Stadium we had to go through a lot of security controls, que for some time and wait. When finally arriving to the last "checkpoint" the guards tell us we have tickets for TOMORROWS TOLANDO! Great, we didn't check the tickets in advance! Totally we had 8 tickets, 4 of them for today, 4 tomorrow and we were told that they were for today. We had come all the way to the stadium, waited there for 2 hours for nothing. ARGH! When trying to get out the guards didn't let us, they said we had to walk around the whole stadium if we wanted to get out, just great. So we get out and after a long walk and Su Dun picked us up. In order to make us feel a little better we went to Häegen-Daez to eat some high class ice cream. Best thing was the we couldn't go home either because we didn't have any key with us, so we had to wait almost 3 hours until the show ended so Hyans mom could come and pick us up. Uff what a waste of a evening!

Tomorrow i will go to the stadium at 19:30 again to wait for another 2 hours and hopefully be let in. But who knows, TIC.

The Tianmen with all parade vehicles

After the whole big 60 years festival with crazy tight security around Tianmen it's finally allowed to go into the Square again. They have a few days exhibition there with all the vehicles that were used in the parade the 1st of October. So far there has been over 1.5 million people visiting this exhibition every day and I was one of them tonight. The amount of people was so amazing, not to mention the traffic to that place. Took us a long time to get there even though we drove a police car :P

The Tianmen was lighted up with thousands and thousands of lights and screens. It was really something to see, I'm uploading a couple of pictures from that place. There also seemed to be a lot of people from al around China who obviously never seen a foreign guy and the all pointed at me and were like FOREIGNER! FOREIGNER! and seemed to have a good time watching me like some strange animal...

Earlier I went to see CATS the musical. It was really good and all the actors were from England of some other country than China. This was the first totally foreign musical I've seen in China so far...

Mid Autumn Festival - Mooncake Festival - Great Wall

We started the day with waking up early and driving to a deserted part of the Great Wall to BBQ. Traffic to this place was horrible because these last 3 days people have just been sitting home watching the national day show on TV like myself as well.

After almost 3 hours and a lot of traffic later we finally arrived at our destination. The gatekeepers had some problem with us bringing the barbeque (grilli) inside the Great Wall area. They told us that today is too windy, it's forbidden to go up on the Wall to BBQ but for a sum of 5 euros we will let you BBQ by the little lake here. Well sure, have 5 euros beat it! Let us make some food awesome food! We are starving after the long car ride. Second problem was getting the BBQ started. We had bought the coal from a street barbequer last night in downtown but could not get it lighted, we didn't have any lightning fuel or stuff like that. Luckily we got this fixed by asking a local barbeqer to borrow us some burning coal.We barbequed sausages, bacon and 5 huge steaks! Food was soo soo soo good and the 24 can beer pack was quickly consumed by the 4 of us (3 finns and 1 brittish) We barbequed sausages, bacon and 5 huge steaks! Food was soo soo soo good and the 24 can beer pack was quickly consumed by the 4 of us (3 finns and 1 brittish)

This place was really nice, it was in a valley and mountains all around. The sky and weather was the clearest and most beautiful i have ever seen in Beijing so far! Incredible! When we were leaving i emptied all the burning coal onto the ground and by accident stepped on one of them, HOOOT! Luckily the swelling was not that bad and i can walk normally, don't understand how those Thai people do that coal walk, crazy....

The Mid Autumn Festival is one of the most important festivals in China. It's the national day (just wrote about it) and a lot of the time is spent with the family. Today is one of those important family days where you either gather a lot of people at someones home or go out for a nice dinner. At these dinners everybody eats mooncakes for dessert, mooncakes can be made of fruits or meat. They look like small moons and some of them can be really expensive like the ones on the picture here. Their price were almost 200 euros...i dunno how they tasted because we gave them as gifts. Maybe I'll get a chance to taste them later.

In the evening i went with Hyans family to a restaurant and everybody treat me so so nice. Sometimes i feel like some kind of royalty who isn't really a royalty but just a fraud, still everybody still treats me incredibly nice. Just gotta love her family's hospitality and Chinese hospitality in general as well. All you who have been here to meet me know what i mean!

Peoples Republic of China 60 Years!!

1.10.2009 at 10 o'clock sharp the National day parade begun. It's impossible to get anywhere near Tianmen where it's held so that's why i did as 1 billion other Chinese did; stayed home and watched the whole show on TV.

The parade began with a short speech from the President and after the speech he rode around the square in a huge Rolls Royce and greeted all the soldiers on the square. The President shouted in the huge speakers "Greetings Comrades" and the army answered "Greetings high commander". After the greetings and formalities the tanks started to roll into the square, hundreds of them! After the 1 hour army march it continued with all kinds of minority groups of China and a lot of dancers. There were thousands and thousands of people passing the square every minute but it still went on for almost 3 hours. More people than whole Helsinki took part in this 3 hour amazing event! There were a lot of fighter jets flying around and i managed to take some pictures of them from the balchony.

The evening didn't leave anyone cold either because this was probably the worlds biggest firework show so far. I heard that they used more fireworks yesterday than they did when the Olympics were in Beijing last year. I got some pictures of the fireworks as well and i kinda lighted up the whole downtown. The timing of the fireworks were so amazing, they made figures in the sky of smiley faces and pigeons, never seen anything like this before! China 60 years, i salute you, please open facebook, youtube and my blogg ASAP!


At the moment Hede is posting and updating my blog because i can't access it anymore...