As Clean as the Queen.

The focus of the day today was cleaning. That's right, we came to China to clean... :/

You wouldn't believe how dirty this apartment was. I would post up pictures of it but unfortunately, my camera made the place look clean. Which it seriously wasn't! We got up at 07:00 but because we really didn't want to make a start, the cleaning got delayed until 09:20. From then on, it was just 4hours straight of cleaning, complaining, and cringing. How is it possible to get weird brown stuff on the kitchen ceiling? Who in their right mind thinks that leaving their old, used shower scrub puff behind in the bathroom for two months for the next renters to see is acceptable? Exactly what were the people here last thinking when they left their dirty towels and toothbrushes behind? Were we meant to reuse them or something? Ew, no thanks. *disgusted face*

Anyway, we kind of needed to make a move on the cleaning anyway since the 3bedroom apartment needed a third person (since I'm not to be staying here for long) otherwise the rent is just too much for two people, and there was supposed to be a potential visitor to look at the apartment; she's a SOAS student so we kind of know her. Well, that's what was supposed to have happened but it turned out that she didn't actually come see the flat in the end because she waited at the wrong place to the decided meet-up spot. Oh well, at least the apartment got cleaned.

Just before we were supposed to go out and meet Ibby though, we all had a quick shower before because of all the cleaning we had done. Embarrassingly though, I managed to lock myself in the bedroom. Although this wasn't really my fault. The bedroom doors don't have a handle on the inside but it has a button to lock it, which I pushed by accident. So I was standing there struggling to somehow open the door from the inside, and Charlotte and Tanya on the outside couldn't do anything to help because I had locked the room from the inside. After a good few minutes, I managed to somehow unlock the door and free myself, but boy was that scary. D:

We then rearranged a different day for her to come look around the apartment, and instead, we met up with Charlotte's Beijing friend Dong Hao (董浩) or also just 'Scott', as he offered to show us around our area and sort a few things out. For example, he helped us buy Chinese phones and SIM cards for 500yuan (but just the SIM card for me for 100yuan since I'm planning on buying the Xiaomi M2 in October) where we have enough credit until December 2013 and don't have to top up at all. Pretty good deal eh. :D

After that, he helped us sort out how to top up the apartment electricity at the bank, and then treated us to a drink at the nearby cafe 巴里岛 to our apartment as he annotated a map of Beijing for us, pointing out all the hotspots for shopping, sightseeing, and the important subway stations.

Scott left at around 18:00 and then we stayed around in our apartment until 20:00 where we had planned to go out and have dinner with Dominic and Adam since we hadn't met up since the Thorpe Park trip at the end of exams.

We had to make our way to BNU campus as we were meeting outside the McDonald's we ate from - their apartment is attached to McDonald's. We then made our way to the subway station to get to the eating place, thus experiencing our first journey on the subway. It was actually pretty nice. Amazing in fact. The subway is surprisingly clean, bright, and white. And the actual subway train was just as good too - air conditioned, smooth and sturdy tracks, and it wasn't as crowded. Although maybe that's because of the time we took it. I'd say the only bad thing about it is that people really don't care about anything when they get on or off the train. They will push you, nudge you, jam their elbows into you, and it seems like that's perfectly normal. Although one guy did accidentally step on my foot and then repeatedly said "对不起" about three times.

So we had dinner at a small restaurant, along with some of Adam's friends who were also SOAS students who had just finished their second year (since he had been doing an internship in Beijing for about a month before we arrived). We ordered Coca Cola, the custom bowls of rice, and vegetarian side dishes of egg dumplings, some asparagus/ chilli/ corn pepper dish, a potato/ aubergine/ pepper dish, a lettuce dish, as well as meat dumplings and some vegetables with meat dish. The food was pretty good and flavoursome, which was a nice change to the ramyun and drinks we had been eating to keep us alive in Beijing.

After this was over, we got the subway back to near BNU and then parted ways. Us three girls didn't get back to the apartment until about 23:00, to which we were quite tired by then so just sat around on our laptops until we fell asleep.