A football match, a Ball and a trip to the mountains
If you would like to see more about this month feel free to check out the video I made for November.
At the start of the month, 刘先生 invited Peter and I to watch Tianjin Teda play their last game of the season. The match decided if they were going to be relegated. The game was intense with the opposing team getting the first goal. Later on, Teda managed to secure two more goals soon after and then just before full time they secured a further two goals. The atmosphere was incredible when they won.
In the first weekend, about ten of us all traveled down to Bainshi Mountain to see the incredible views. Waking up at about 6 to get the bus to only arrive in 4/5 hours later. We walked up the hill in the freezing cold. I wasn't quite ready for the temperature drop thinking it wouldn't be too much colder than Tianjin. The shuttle bus was an experience itself, with us all holding onto each other every ten seconds thinking that we were about to crash! The mountain was beautiful and we were even able to see the Great Wall from where we were.
Near the end of the month as a yearly tradition, the scholars are invited to attend the Beijing St. Andrews Ball. We all packed our things and left to get the high-speed train. The train even reached a speed of 350km/h and it only took 30 minutes to get from Tianjin to Beijing whereas when we landed in Beijing we took the bus which took us about 3 hours to get there. With limited and rough directions given to me by our hostel, we headed off on our hunt to find it. Once we had found the hostel and everything was sorted, we were all ready to get dressed up. Arriving at the ball I immediately felt as if we was in the wrong place; the location was in a five-star hotel with a grand entrance. Walking down to the ball there were waiters going around with trays of food and drinks. We spent the night dancing to a ceilidh band and eating traditional Scottish food.
After our jampacked month with exams, hill walking, dancing and football games, Jodie and I decided to get out and explore the city a bit more. We got onto our mobikes and cycled off to find the colloseum. We stayed there for a while and I ended up playing football with a young Chinese boy and his sister! After the colloseum, we thought it would be a great idea to head off into a random direction then follow the green lights. When we decided to head back we didn’t realise that we hadn’t actually thought about how we were going to get back, however we remembered that if we found the TV tower we’d be fine but due to our luck the pollution was so bad that we couldn’t actually see the tower from where we were. So there we were cycling around Tianjin trying to find some maps to get us back to either the colloseum or the TV tower. Luckily it didn't take us too long to find our way back.
