Glasses and Placement Exam.

I finally met my room mate today. Actually, I had caught a glimpse of her on Monday morning when she briefly came into the room in the morning to drop some stuff off, but I was still in bed. And then Tuesday night, because I had come home from the Korean restaurant so late, she was already sleeping in bed. But today, we finally talked and introduced ourselves. Her name is Morimo Haruka, 21 years old, with an older sister who is 23. She's studying a 4year degree in education at BNU, and has just entered her 3rd year.

Since we had nothing much planned for the day, we decided today was a good day to find somewhere to get some glasses. As we wandered through BNU, it seemed like there was some kind of student fair thing going on. There were lots of stalls and students behind them handing out bags and stuff. Charlotte and I walked up to one advertising Ice Tea because we really wanted a drink of Ice Tea. We weren't really quite sure what you had to do though, whether it was something you signed up for or whether you just got a free bag, so we just stood in front of the stall. The students asked us something but we had no idea what they were saying, and then they started saying in Chinese that we were English and couldn't understand them. We all had a bit of an awkward moment, laughed, then walked away in embarrassment... :/

At the glasses place, the lady there knew that our Chinese wasn't that good but she was patient with us and we managed to get the message across that I needed glasses and that Tanya needed wanted lenses to put inside a glasses frame she had bought with her. I chose the frames of the glasses I wanted, and then the lady took us to have our eyes checked, where we had to wear some funny looking glasses for 20minutes after she had worked out the lenses we needed.

The variety of glasses frames to choose from.

After this, we went to have lunch at one of the on campus restaurants. The restaurant is actually really nice and clean, and the wall decorations are pretty darn good too.

My lunch was Bibimbap with squid. So good!! The bibimbap sauce could've been hotter but it was still pretty good. Probably the best Chinese Bibimbap I've had since here in China so far.

At 15:00 we had to make our way to have our placement exam. The paper was split up into listening, reading, grammar, and writing sections. It was actually a lot harder than the stuff we had been studying at SOAS. Half the characters on the paper, I didn't even know. But I guess it would be like that since there are people of so many different levels taking the same examination paper.

After 1 and a half hours, we had to make our way upstairs to have a short speaking exam. Students were in the speaking room for various amounts of time, and I soon discovered why when it was my turn.

When I got called in, there were two teachers who asked questions to see how our spontaneous speaking was, and then we had to do some reading. The sentence I got given was about 50 characters long. I read about 20 odd characters before one of the teachers suddenly said "Finished". I hadn't even got to the end of the sentence and yet the exam was over. Not sure whether that was good or bad.. :/

Since the placement exam was just ridiculous, we decided to buy some comfort food. Cake!!

I was quite looking forward to eating this but ended in disappointment. Overall, it just wasn't sweet enough. The sponge at the bottom was kinda plain, and the main beige coloured bit was a weird texture. It seemed like it was meant to be cheesecake but it wasn't. I don't know what it was meant to be but it was okay, just not up to expectations..