Our destination, 7353km away. We would travel this distance in a little more than nine hours.
Alex and I met up at Tegel Airport on Friday at 6pm. After a Frappuccino Mocha at *bucks
we headed towards check in. Everything went smoothly, no complications with our luggage.
The flight with Hainan Airlines was a straight flight with a duration of ~9 hours.
The ambiance in the aircraft was quite noisy, lots of people talking, chinese
elevator music in the background and hectic stewardesses trying to calm the crowd.
Nevertheless time flew by with a good amount of inflight entertainment and red wine refills.
Tired but happy, we made it!
On our way out of the airport, after we fetched our luggage, we were greeted by our teacher Chen,
two Students (Li & Zhu) and one man, the driver?, who remained unknown to us. They were overly attentive towards us, immediately carrying our luggage for us. It was awkward. The 1/2 hour ride
to our college did not help either. Li & Zhu have only a very limited amount of English vocabulary and
our teacher Chen has a mixture of basic English and Chinese accent, which is very difficult to understand, too. Alex and I did our best to make conversation and Li & Zhu seemed to use a
prefabricated list of questions to help get things along.
After we arrived at the Beijing Polytechnic College they showed us our luxurious apartment,
located in the girls barracks, which will serve as our new home for the coming two months.
Normally this apartment provides more than sufficient living space for a total of eight students,
but fortunately we had it all for ourself.
Overwhelmed by our impressions we were led to a restaurant famous for their delicious dumplings.
Our guides placing the order was a more timeconsuming task than one would imagine – total of 20min.
The dumplings were delicious and came in huge quantities.
to be continued, n8n8