Nathaniel and Sheree back in Australia

Sheree’s school orientation started today. We officially meet all the other new teachers at a cafe and then jumped on a mini bus for a tour of Yizhuang with one of the teachers that lived at Yizhuang last year as a tour guide. She told us about all the shops and restaurants that were worth checking out. During our previous two weeks we had already discovered half of them but there was a really cool market that we hadn’t found. Apparently the market is the best place to buy fresh fruit and vegetables although you can buy other things there as well. In the afternoon we went into the city to open Chinese bank accounts which took ages. I was really worried about account keeping fees because my Australian account has a $5 per month account keeping fees even if you don’t do anything with it. I was plesently supprised to find out that over here they only charge a 10 Yuan ($1.5) account keeping fee per year.

Today ended up being a really big day. It started off well with an Indian and Thia buffet lunch in the city. After lunch we went to the Beijing Development Museum via the subway which was really informative despite the fact that most of the displays where in Chinese. Then we tried to find the International Post Office to pick up two packages from Australia. This is when things started going down hill. There are two international post offices. Our package was at the smaller one that wasn’t well known. We only had the address in Chinese and we ended up being directed to the larger International Post Office that was didn’t want to go to. After we arrive we were directed back to the other post office which was near where we’d started. We ended up walking around for just under and hour but we got the packages in the end which made it all worth it.

Today we went shopping for Mao and bought him a scratching post and lots of other cool toys. After we came home we went to the ice skating ring behind our house with some of the other teachers. It was surreal. The entire ice skating rink was filled with fog so thick that you couldn’t see more than 20 meters in front of you. Depending on where you were in felt like you were the only person in the ring and then someone else would appear from the middle of the fog and zoom past. It was really cool watching some of the other skaters that were ice skating students and coaches. The were spinning  and jumping and flying all over the ice skating ring in and out of the fog. If we’d gone later on in the day I think we would have skated with a really different crowd.