Women only. Men stop here now.

After a couple of loooong days, I can finally let out a huge sigh of pent up tension, wiggle my toes free of fatigue and announce with semi-certainty that I'm settled in Beijing. After I last wrote, which I forgot to mention was pre-boarding at the airport, I was relieved to observe that the plane was not missing any discernible parts. I didn't know what to make of the stewardess outfits of day-glow yellow tshirts and black courdroys though... I also had an 8 hour overnight layover in Shenzhen, where to my dismay they do not have a transit lounge with open bar and internet, and woe is me I had to lie on a hard metal bench in this dingy hallway with a fellow budget traveller and someone I'm pretty sure was homeless. To add insult to injury there was a glass enclosed VIP area with inviting leather couches directly in front of us but that was locked up for the night for our viewing pleasure. And I've heard so many horror stories of luggage being stolen as the victim dozed off that I kept one eye open the entire night. But I survived with the spirit of a bona fide hustler and is that ca-ching I hear in my pockets?

Tsinghua University is like a township in itself. It is massive. I walked from the north side to the south today and it took about fourty minutes, I live on the east side and have yet to see the west. The foreign students administration thought it necessary for each step of the registration to take place in a different building, so that was really a treat. I had to pay for the dorm, which I would like to announce is 6 times the amount a domestic student pays, purchase an internet package that counts down my hours- I'm so not used to limited cyber time gahh, pay an unexplained registration fee, open a bank account, get a cell phone, pay for a meal card, and begin the process for my visa conversion from a tourist to a student. To get a student visa I had to go to some health clinic and get an inspection done so I walked into the frigid snowfall this morning to try to locate this place. Met another exchange student from Pakistan who was also headed there and together tried to flag down a taxi. Apparently this place is like in the country and so obscure that NO taxi out of the five we stopped would take us there. Just when all options seemed to go to hell this sketchbag guy in a rundown car shows up out of nowhere and offers to drive us there and back for 100RMB. I look at my new friend, he looks at me, and we jump in with the desperation of two students perilously close to deportation. There were a million other foreign students at the centre and most of them paid double what we did for similar "private taxis", so lesson learned is that good things come from trusting shady dudes promising to absolve your problems. Read up, kids!

After six hours of wandering around campus and the surrounding perimeter today I've concluded that Beijing is daunting and massive and that the campus is nowhere in walking distance of anything significant save for a sprawling mobile phone and electronics supercenter. I'm now alone in my room safely guarded by a sign on the floor saying "Women only. Men stop here now." My lovely roommate and fellow Ivey col to the league arrives tomorrow, and I'm relieved to finally have someone to practice Canadian english with again. My english has been getting progressively worse with each new Asian country I'm inhabiting. And it's not like my Chinese is improving exponentially or that I've learned any Nepali at all. I almost couldn't recognize my voice when I spoke today, spitting out some mutant crossover of fob and Singlish (truly amusing for anyone who's ever heard it). Be glad there's no audio accompaniment to this blog.

Now its off to rest for me, as I'm missing a tube of blood from my 2 hour examination this morning. I was surprised to find drawing blood no biggie, since I've built up this unnerving fear of it ever since I tried giving blood a few times in the past and was denied each time. Evidently since I have lived in England once upon a time, I undoubtably possess mad cow disease, and oh think of the unsuspecting recipients who I have potential to mentally destabilize. Don't worry though, I have other ways to go about that. The Canadian Blood Foundation ain't got nothin on me.