Chapter six: Holidays are back!

We've only had 2 weeks of classes and there's a holiday already. Thank you China for planning your one-week national holiday at the beginning of october!

After some very very last minute planning, Ivan and I went on an organised Chinese trip. Needless to say we were the only white people and we understood nothing of what the tourguide said: it added to the charm. But first things first.

Departure

Travelling to the train station was a challenge on its own. Chinese. National. Holiday. This means half of China would be taking trains as well. Yangyang and Siyu were very very worried we wouldn't make it to the train station on time due to traffic jams around the city, so we left 4 hours in advance. Yet this was an example of how over-worried they are of us sometimes - bless them :) - so we arrived at the train station with 2 more hours to kill and surrounded by half of Beijing at one square. Lots of people wanted to take pictures with us though so we had something to do! At 19h we found our tourguide at the meeting point and all was well. The station was crowded but okay, and aside from some trouble concerning Ivan's knife everything went very smoothly! We also helped some Chinese old ladies by switching beds: we took the top ones and they could more easily get into the bottom ones. The train and bed itself was comfortable, much better than I expected my first (chinese) night train to be!

Day 1

We had to travell another full day by bus before we reached our final destination, so we made some fun stops along the way. First stop was some very weird deserted theme-park-ish area, but nevertheless there were some nice parts to explore. Next up was canoeing: lots of fun in our smurf outfits! At night we visited a forrest with a lot of waterfalls and even more lights, magical. We also learned that the old ladies from the train were at the same trip with us, and since the tourguide wasn't putting that much effort in talking to us the old ladies took good care of us. We couldn't speak the same language, but they really tried to communicate to tell us when to be where and what to do!

Day 2

We arrived at our destination: ???! This inactive volcano is situated at the border of North Korea and it has a lake on top: heaven lake (??). Our original plan of entering North Korea almost worked, but unfortunately we didn't get a chance to get near enough. We did see it though, as border is in the middle of the lake! Other things to see there were: mist, chinese people, mist, more chinese people, taking a bus from one spot to another, more chinese people. But defintely worth it! One of the girls on our trip, Hermosa, also helped us since her English was very well. We stayed with her when we visited the birch forest, the hot water springs and the waterfall at the volcano.

Day 3

At the last day we visited another volcanic area. Actually we weren't even aware of this in advance, we thought we would stay at Chang Bai Mountain for a longer period but since we don't understand Chinese we were a bit lost in translation. Anyway, since we didn't get a chance to swim in the Heaven Lake, we settled for this one. A volcanic lake is a volcanic lake after all! As usual the tourguide was very mad ('unsafe, unsafe') and the old ladies were cheering. ^^

Going home

I got very sick after eating a fish from the lake, so the bus and trainride wasn't so ideal for me. Luckily, Ivan and the old ladies were very kind to try to help me! In the end, we became very good friends with the ladies and exchanged wechat!

The rest of the week: work & fun in Beijing

Unfortunately for us, literally all of our professors gave us homework because 'we have a 10 day holiday so a lot of time'. So the rest of the holiday we spent working. Yet we tried to have some fun as well, so we explored the Olympic Village and I went swimming at the water cube! Very nice! :D

Fun Fact: from nearby the bird's nest is an extremely ugly building

Fun Fact: it's freezing already but the heating systems need to be fixed first, in every room, so we won't have heating untill november 15th!