BoC.

I had a bit of a nightmare last night, if it could be called that. I woke up in the middle of the night (it must’ve been about 3ish), looked up at the ceiling and thought I saw this black spidery looking creature about 2 inches big crawling along the ceiling, and then falling down on top of me. I immediately shrieked, as you do, and ran across to the other side of the room. Tanya, who slept on the sofa on the side of the room I ran to, woke up and asked me what the matter was. However as I was still in a bit of a fazed state, I somehow forgot I was China, I didn’t know where I was, and didn’t know who this girl was that was talking to me. I took a closer look at my friend but couldn’t figure out who she was and so I kept asking over and over “who are you?!” to which she replied with her name yet I still could not comprehend. I must’ve asked who she was about 10 times before I suddenly realised that she was indeed Tanya. I then explained about the scary spider, and then fell back asleep atop the sofa I came from.

A few hours later and I found I managed to wake up at 06:00 on the dot. That’s pretty amazing coming from someone like me who tends to sleep in quite late. Perhaps this was thanks to all the babysitting of Zayan for a month, so I had become accustomed to waking up at such early times in the morning.

Anyway, as my two friends were still asleep, I decided to lie back down and just daydream for a few minutes before deciding to spend my time doing better things such as studying. An hour later, Charlotte then Tanya woke up and we just sat around for a while planning our day, to which we decided that we should open up a bank account to deposit money so that the two could pay the landlady the rent.

At about 09:50 we left the apartment to make our way to the BNU campus since that is where a Bank of China branch lies. When we asked to open a bank account, we had a bit of a problem since none of us yet had Chinese phone numbers. Luckily, after about 10minutes trying to figure out what to do, the staff accepted our suggestion of using the landlady’s number. And then we were on our way to opening up some bank accounts. We had arrived at the bank at around 11:00 after exploring the roads of Beijing to find the University, but didn’t actually leave until about 13:40. Why? Well Charlotte missed her number being called out by the till people and so had to retrieve a new number and wait for 30people to be served first before her number was called out again.

In the meantime, I attempted to deposit some money into my bank account I had just opened using the ATM machine in the bank. I had 9000RMB on me to deposit. However, as I deposited the money and the machine counted the notes, I received a message a number of times saying that some of the notes I had were fake. Rest assured however, as a few minutes later I realised that it was because I was just scrappily putting the money into the machine rather than placing them in all neat and tidy.

It was then lunch time since we hadn’t really eaten breakfast, so we decided to check out the McDonalds on the road opposite. Now believe it or not, but we actually managed to buy food without any problem. I guess you could argue that this was because most of the food we wanted were in the adverts above the counters and labelled with numbers, so we only had to do a bit of sign language and say “我要这个.” Pretty simple right? So I ordered the best burger you could get (the Fillet-o-Fish) and some bubble tea.

After lunch, we went to buy some cleaning products as we decided to deep clean the apartment seeing how the previous people living here don’t understand the meaning of the word “clean”. That said, we didn’t actually get back to the apartment until about 17:00ish. By this time, we were much too tired to do anything. Just wanted to go to sleep.