Preparations for the visit to China are well underway. Mrs Davies has put together a journal and ideas for students so that they can create wonderful memories to share with their family and our student community upon their return.
We have all arrived in Beijing safe and sound. Everyone is very tired but excited and looking forward to getting to our hotel. Although the flights were long they both went very quickly with lots to see, especially in Dubai airport. It's half past five here and we are just on the coach travelling from Beijing airport to the Rainbow Hotel. We expect it to take about an hour but it's peak time and we've just been informed there are six million cars in Beijing so we could be waiting a little longer for our dinner. We are off to the forbidden city and Beijing Zoo tomorrow where we shall hopefully pick up our mascot and see the pandas (something we've all been looking forward to). 1 hour later... We arrived at our hotel and had a lovely meal (a mixture of Chinese and Western dishes). Our guides promised us a much more authentic Chinese meal tomorrow which we are all excited but a little apprehensive about. We then had a lot of fun figuring out our hotels fabulous li...
Today's the day! After a few changes to the itinerary, today's the day we finally get to go and see the pandas. We got up and went for breakfast earlier than planned and then we arrived at the meeting point early (we were all really excited). It took us about an hour to get to the the zoo and we waited outside while our guide Kevin sorted our tickets out. We took lots of group photos outside with our banner. This is always funny because we get lots of Chinese people stopping to watch and asking to take photos with us and our banner. First stop, the pandas ... They were all so fluffy and chubby and cute. They were either eating bamboo (they couldn't get the leaves in fast enough) or they were asleep - sprawled out with their legs resting in the air or star-fished on their bellies like a human. We all returned to the shop at the end to buy panda teddies (apart from Dannielle who got her tiger). We wondered around after seeing lots of animals we haven't seen before. T...
Day 12 In today's Mandarin lesson we learnt about different foods. This included staple foods like rice and noodles but also special foods that are involved in festivals such as dumplings in the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year). In the breaks Abener, one of our teachers, put Chinese music on and then me and Alex B went downstairs looking for Pokemon (we admit we've joined the craze!). We also learnt how to pronounce our Chinese names in the second lesson. After lunch we took a bus ride for about an hour to the Museum of Ancient Vestige of King Dynasty. This museum is in a place where there was once a huge palace (nearly as big as the forbidden city) hundreds of years ago. However the Mongolian people tore it down when they invaded. Many artefacts have been recovered from the area and we could see these in the museum. There were lots of carvings, bowls, mirrors and even some sitting dragons. There were also paintings and calligraphy produced by the descendants of the King ...
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