Not much news this week, I'm afraid.

I have settled into the routine of uni (or should I say high school?). Getting up at 6.30am is getting easier, but the time at which I go to bed is starting to rival Dad's! After class finished, my friends and I usually have lunch in one of the cafeterias (average price = AU$2 for a main meal and rice). The meals I order at the moment are quite limited to the characters I can read and pronounce though! And the Sweet + Sour dishes are definitely better here.

On Wednesday after uni, Luchi and I went shopping at Wangfujing Dajie. Managed to find a cute mandarin-collared cream blouse with bubble sleeves from ONLY for 299元. My taxi driver on the way from from Wangfujing (I think his name was Deyun) was the first cabbie I've had so far who struck up a conversation. His pronunciation was very "Beijing-ish"... They really like to say 'rrrrr' a lot, so I couldn't understand everything he was saying. But he got me to read out signs as we drove past them, and he would then correct me if I got a character wrong. He also mentioned that I am very beautiful and would make a wonderful wife - haha! I don't think I'd have any problems finding a prospective husband here if I wanted!

Thursday night - we tried 肚皮舞 - that's belly dancing for the folks playing at home. Candy (an Aussie, from Sydney but originally from Hong Kong) dragged Mega (from Jakarta, Indonesia) and I along because she wanted to try it. By the end of the class, Mega and I were signing up for 20 lessons, but Candy obviously wasn't as impressed! But I have definitely learnt that Asian girls cannot dance. And either can I! It should be fun though, 2 one-hour classes a week on Tuesday and Thursday nights. I think sometime this coming week we are going to try Yoga and Latin dancing too and see how that is.

Friday's class was possibly the hardest we have had so far. Every day we seem to average one "lesson" per day (whereas at ANU we were averaging one per week). Thursday's homework was to memorize 8 lessons worth of dialogue and new words, in preparation for a 2 hour oral test! I was definitely glad when that class was over.

Satuday - hmm... what a day. Dragged my lazy self to uni to meet Mega, Candy and Liz (also from Indonesia) and we went to lunch to China's version of McDonalds. Wasn't the best chow in the world, but definitely better than the cow lung and liver kebabs I ate last week (oh, did I mention that? Definitely wasn't memorable). Then we went SHOPPING! There is nothing in Australia that compares to it. Two floors, with hundreds of tiny little stores. And by tiny, I mean 4m x 4m square. I didn't see any other Caucasians while I was there, and its not somewhere a tourist would go. The majority of the stores are clothing, jewellery, belts, shoes and bags. Everything is incredibly cheap, but of course you have to bargain (in Chinese - none of the 'stores' we looked at could speak English, so it was great to discuss the item in question without the store-owner understanding). But I had never realized how long it takes to bargain something down! On average, it took us around 1/2 hour for each item we wanted to buy (thus why we were there for 5 hours, until the place closed). I ended up buying a "Juicy Couture" cream bag with gold studs (that thankfully doesn't have Juicy emblazoned on it anywhere) and a grey knit sweater dress for 37元 and 40元 respectively. That's about AU$15. *I think I have died and gone to Heaven*

Huh... I guess it turns out I had a pretty eventful week after all!

( Will be posting pics from our first week in Beijing soon - hopefully today sometime )