Chapter five: Holidays are over

After Helena's visit I couldn't deny it any longer: work had to be done. But of course, I'm in Beijing, so I tried to balance work and fun these two weeks.

The work.

We decided to work on a hutong site at the Tsinghua campus. We did a lot of site visits to existing hutongs in the centre of Bejing (really, a lot...), and also started to work on a model for our proposal (for which we got bad comments every time :'( ).

But there was also some fun during the work: the CEO of ArchDaily came to THU to give a guest lecture in one of our courses! It was a great opportunity to listen to his experiences and to chat with him afterwards!

The fun.

Tsinghua University is very big, it's as big as the whole city of Leuven. So, what do all these students do for entertainment? Cafés and bars you will not find on campus (you know, China...), but sports you will find everywhere! At night, everyone is playing sports. My and my friends bought tennis rackets to play every week, and I go swimming as much as I can. But I also started practicing a new sport: Kung Fu ??! I've always wanted to learn martial arts, so why not start when living in China, the birthplace of Kung Fu.

Apart from sports, there were - of course - a lot of parties. One in particular I would like to share here: Ricardo's birthday. He was the first of our studio to have a birthday, so we celebrated with the whole group! Everyone brought something (I provided the much appreciated Stella Artois) to the design studio where we had some beers, cake and played some games. Afterwards we went to Elements to have a killer party! It was a nice evening to get to know everyone a little bit better.

Fun fact: 'french fries' in Chinese characters says 'Belgian fries' ... ;)

We also visited the 798 district: an art hub. Looking for an exhibition about a fridge in a dessert, we ended up at an Andy Warhol exhibition to play with clouds.

Fun fact: there are traffic lights which show both red and green for bikes at the same time... #onlyinchina

Special guest: a KU Leuven professor.

I was having some troubles with my learning agreement concerning credits, and KU Leuven just couldn't come to a decision. Their solution? Professor Coomans is in Beijing next week, meet with him to talk about it! The thing is, in China it's completely normal to add your professors on wechat, chat with them, send them smileys (and even pictures)... It was weird to send pictures and chat with a Leuven professor, very weird. But the meeting itself was quite nice! We spent 15 minutes talking about the problem, and 2 hours exploring Beijing together!