Exams and a Ball
It was a tough start to our third month in China due to the fact we had our mid-term exams. Overall we had 4 exams for our 4 classes and this had me and all the other scholars all very stressed. The less said about this week of exams the better! After this week me and one of my fellow scholars went to visit a Chinese family. This turned out to be a great way to practise and helped us sound more authentic with our Chinese. The family we met was made up of 爸爸，妈妈 , 和两个孩子(mum, dad and 2 children).
While at their home we played chess with their 7 year old son to which we were very proud to say we won and made homemade dumplings.
After this we had Chinese equivalent to Black Friday called singles day, the majority of the deals were on Taobao which is the Chinese version to Amazon. Sadly I seemed to have forgotten to use my common sense on singles day because most of the thing ordered didn’t fit!! Other than this it was pretty fun having to scout for deals and use our limited knowledge of Chinese to guess what it was we were buying.
Nearer the end of the month me and 20 of my fellow scholars went to Beijing for the weekend to go to the Saint Andrews Ball. The weekend didn’t get off to the smooth start we were hoping for though! Me and 3 of the scholars had booked an apartment in Beijing but when we arrived we realised we couldn’t quite find it. After about an hour of looking with heavy bags we called the apartment to say we were lost. After about 30 mins of having to think on our feet with our Chinese on the phone it turned out these apartments didn’t take foreigners. So we were in a random part of Beijing with no place to stay for the night! Luckily, we called up all our fellow scholars and managed to get a place in a youth hostel. It wasn’t all bad we did end up seeing a lot of Beijing! When we got to the hostel we quickly changed into our suits and got taxis to the ball.
The first thing I realised when I arrive at the ball was how big an event it was; business men from China and Scotland came to China just for this event. Throughout the night we were given a 5 course meal with all kinds of Scottish foods ranging from haggis to cheddar cheese, there was even a palette cleanser!
After all this, we danced a ton of ceilidh dances which really took me back to the dances at school. This ended up being a great way to meet people and I ended up having conversations with some really amazing people. To round off the night we were served a full Scottish breakfast, although we were all very full from the meal we’d eaten only hours before we fought through it and ate as much as we could. Going to an event like this was amazing and made you really proud to be Scottish, seeing the effect a small country like ours has in such a massive country like China.