My second month in China

你好 Primary 7, 

Zěn me yàng? (怎么样?) I’ve just finished my second month in Tianjin, China and it’s fair to say that I have adapted to life here. I'm into a daily routine and the weeks are now passing quicker than ever.

October has been quite an eventful month for me. I’ve had a week's holiday for the Mid-Autumn Festival (Moon Festival), I've had mid-term exams and I've closed this eventful month with Halloween festivities.

On the 3rd of October I had my first experience outside of Tianjin when a few of my friends, Noah the Polar Bear and I travelled to Jinan, China for our mid-term holiday.

You’re probably all wondering who Noah the Polar Bear is. Well Noah the Polar Bear is my travel companion and travels with me whenever I’m travelling outside of Tianjin so you will all be seeing him in this blog a lot and when I travel around Asia in January and February.

Noah on a rather crowded train.

We spend 5 and a half hours on an extremely crowded train in the early hours of Tuesday morning. Once we got off the train we travelled to our hotel, dropped our bags, had a couple of hours sleep and then headed out for dinner at this nice Chinese restaurant nearby.

The next day we travelled by bus to a religious/tourist attraction, “Thousand Buddha Mountain”. This was basically a mountain with lots of statues of Buddha in which many Buddhists came to pray. It also happened to be the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) which meant that it was a lot more crowded than we had all expected.

Thousand Buddha Mountain

As well as all the statues and amazing views there was a slide down one side of the mountain. This provided an easier option than walking back down. It was about 400 metres long and without a doubt added an element of fun to our day.

The easy way down.

When we arrived back at the hotel we found Moon cakes in our room. The Moon cake is a celebratory cake that is eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival every year. They come in many different flavours and usually have patterns on the top of the cakes. In China these cakes can cost up to 25 Yuan (approx. £2.50) which is very expensive since you can get two full meals for the price of one moon cake. However, despite the prices they are delicious (好吃).

Have any of you had a moon cake? If so did you like it or not?

Moon Cakes

The other highlight of our trip to Jinan was Mount Taishan (泰山). The mountain was 18 minutes away from Jinan on the bullet train and we had to get up early to make sure that we made it up the mountain. After getting the bullet train that reached a high speed of 308 km per hour, we got a taxi to the bottom of the mountain before starting our climb.

The mountain didn’t have off road trails it was all stairs which proved to be quite a big challenge for us. After 2 and a half hours we reached the cable car which was about half way up the mountain and that cable car then took us to the top of the mountain. The top of the mountain was completely in the clouds and it was extremely hard to see any further than a few metres but at least we could say that we reached the top.

Mount Taishan

On the way back from Jinan we had standing tickets for the train. This meant that we were standing in the aisle of the train for 5 and a half hours which was an interesting and funny experience but because of this it was actually extremely enjoyable.

Did any of you go anywhere nice for your October holiday?

Once back in Tianjin my focus moved to mid-term exams. The mid-term exams were important exams since they go towards 40% of the final grade. However, it was worth the hard work as I ended up getting good marks in all my exams.

Halloween followed my mid-term exams and on 31st October my classmates and I dressed up to celebrate. I dressed all in black and, with the help of one of the scholars, I had my face transformed into a very realistic skeleton.

The skeletons on Tianjin.

Since China doesn’t celebrate Halloween as much as we do back in Scotland we had a lot of attention from the Chinese. We had a lot of people taking photos of us including Chinese and Korean people from the same university.

What did you all dress up as for Halloween? Did you go trick or treating?

Exercise

Research the Mid-Autumn Festival:

What do they do on the day?

What food do they eat?

Do people exchange gifts/presents?

Do they have decorations? And if they do what kind?