Da jia hao! 大家好！

Compared with January and February, March has been a fairly uneventful month. We had a few days before classes restarted to catch up with each other about our travel adventures, and now we have all settled in again and are back into the routine of classes with some new teachers for this semester.

We have had lots of variable weather recently; after a few days of sunshine and wearing shorts and t-shirts, we had to dig out our fluffy coats again as the temperature dropped not long after. We have also had really strong wind. There is now some blossom on the trees outside our accommodation building; it is nice to see that spring has finally sprung after a cold winter and there are new green leaves on the trees.

Some useful Chinese weather vocabulary:

• 天气怎么样? (tiān qì zěn me yàng?) - How is the weather today?

• 热 (rè) - hot

• 冷 (lěng) - Cold

• 今天天气冷 (jīn tiān tiān qì lěng) -Today, the weather is cold

• 晴天 (qíngtiān) - Sunny

• 下雨 (xià yu) - Rain

• 雪 (xuě) - Snow

• (大）风 (dà) fēng) - (Strong) wind

•  多云 (duō yún) - Cloudy

• 季节（jì jié) - Seasons

• 春天 (chūn tiān) - Spring

• 夏天 (xià tiān) - Summer

• 秋天 (qiū tiān) -Autumn

• 冬天 (dōng tiān) - Winter

Last weekend, I went scuba diving in an aquarium in Beijing. We don't go to Beijing very often so it was nice to see somewhere a bit different. In the aquarium we swam with nurse sharks and leopard sharks this time as well as a yellowfin tuna and another turtle. Afterwards, I went to Wangfujing, a famous pedestrianised shopping street in Beijing for some lunch and some window shopping.

My roommate’s mum has also just arrived in China for a brief stay. It was lovely to meet her, and she even brought some liquorice allsorts out for me, something I have really missed!

In the last week in March, an organisation called Language Mix held an event for the first time in Tianjin. It is an event designed for language learners to meet together and speak in their mother tongues as well as speaking foreign languages with others. We wore stickers of the flags of the languages we could speak so that people could approach each other and speak to each other based on common languages. There were around 150 people there, among them Hungarian speakers, Finnish speakers, and of course lots of Chinese people we could practice with! Although it was tiring to speak English, French and Chinese, and often a mix of all three languages, it was lovely to meet lots of new people.

我希望四月比三月有意思，再见!