As Poor As A Tramp.

Had to get up extra early since today was the opening ceremony for international students at BNU. To be honest, I think it was pretty pointless and a waste of 2 hours.. :/ All that happened was a few important people were introduced, they gave speeches about how amazing BNU is, some representatives talked about why they go to BNU, and then some Italian psychologist had a 40 minute speech about how to fight depression. So boring!! Quite a few people fell asleep, me included. After that, a policemen gave a small talk about Chinese road laws and regulations. But he didn't really give much advice. He just said stuff like "Don't drink and drive," "Don't drive when sleeping," "Foreigners are banned from riding motorcycles" - and an image of a foreigner covered in blood and head come off after getting into an accident was shown.. o.O

After the pointless ceremony had finished, we had to immediately rush to Haidian Clinic to retrieve our physical examination results since Beth's visa was soon to expire so she needed the results to hand in to the uni and prevent herself from being an illegal citizen. Looking at the results, it seems like my blood type is B+. I always thought I was an O this whole time but I guess not.

When we got back to BNU, I decided that I might as well pay my rent since I wasn't really gonna be doing anything for the rest of the day, plus I'd have to pay it sooner or later anyway since it had to be paid by Sunday. I had to sit in Bank of China for a good 2hours before I got my money and it was there that I discovered that I now have to live in conditions like never before. :O My rent was 7800yuan which covers until January 10th but I didn't have enough money in my bank and had to borrow 500yuan off Tanya. Since it also takes 7days for money to be transferred, I'm gonna have to somehow manage living off practically nothing for a week..

After handing in my rent to the desk people at Lan Hui, I got a call from the bank. They told me that they had done something wrong when I withdrew my money and so needed to come back so I told them that I'd immediately come back as soon as I could. It's a lucky thing that my dormitory is just a 5minute walk from the bank.

Since it was after closing hours at the bank, the guards had to specially open up the doors for Tanya and I to go through. The bank people then tried to explain the problem but I had no idea what they were saying. I knew they wanted to do something with my card but I didn't know what so I just gave it to them and let them do their thing. We actually had a bit of a laugh with the bank people since communication wasn't too good. In the end though it seemed that the guy who did my transaction had accidentally inputted that I had withdrew 600yuan rather than 6000yuan.

Did pretty much nothing until dinner time where we walked down one of the nearby hutongs and found a small place to have dinner for just 50p. The portion is actually bigger than it looks so well worth the money!!

We then wandered the rest of the hutong for a while and stopped off at a drinks place. I bought a mango ice smoothie drink, and the guy who made my drink also gave me another one for free and said that it was a bit more milkier so I might like it better.

I did finish them both but man, it sure was cold. I had the brainfreeze feeling in my throat, and the cold night air didn't really help. But the man was right, the milkier drink was not only milkier, but had more of a mango taste too.