day 1 in beijing
after 6hrs of flight onboard air china, we safely arrived in beijing.. the airport was so big that the plane glided for almost 15min after it landed! and we had to take a monorail to the luggage claim area. imagine the amount of land they have..
yizhong (our senior) came to fetch us and we took a cab down to our hotel. the first interesting thing i observed here is that the cab drivers dun like to switch on their air-cons! they will juz wind down their windows bcoz the air outside is cold enough to act as air-con. but at the same time, the air is so dry and the exhaust fumes blowing at u during traffic jams makes it irritating. i wonder if they on the air-con during summer..
so we arrived at our "super-8" hotel. it's quite a small hotel but the room is satisfactory. maybe the only downside is that there is no lift and we had to carry our luggage up to our room on the 3rd floor. din get much rest before we went out for breakfast. our first breakfast in beijing was 包子! it was very cheap and edible! lol.. juz a little salty.
then it was apartment-viewing time! we spent pretty long at the first apartment because the tenant locked the door from inside and we couldnt contact him. the door was so sound proof that he cant even hear us knocking damn hard. finally we managed to get in and he was watching tv in his room. no wonder.. the apartment had a nice layout, all the rooms are of similar sizes, but the kitchen was pretty small and the toilets are quite pathetic.. overall it looked too old for our liking thou the owner said he will help us redo the place..
the second apartment is the condo where quite a number of our classmates stay. the house was cleaner but it is a 3-room double-storey flat. the layout is abit weird, with 2 big rooms upstairs and a small room downstairs. so we decided to give that up too.
the 3rd apartment is where we are living now! it's a 6-storey condo with lift. our house is on the 2nd floor, so it's quite good exercise climbing the stairs everyday. although it's oso a 3-room apartment, the living room is so big that an extra room can be easily partitioned out. so we settled for the apartment because it looks relatively new and the location is pretty good. it's juz a 15-min walk to our hospital and 10-min walk to the market where everything u'll ever need can be found there. the rent is still within our budget. 5.4k every month and we distributed it equally according to the size of our rooms. i got the master bedroom with the toilet, coz my mum will come visiting so i have enough room to accommodate her!
so after juz 3 apartments we got our house settled! after which we had our lunch. noodles at a place nearby, as usual, salty and oily.. and the quantity is alot! then we went to the bank to open accounts. bank of china is nicely furnished! their bank goes by queue numbers, so u no need to physically queue up. i think it's quite nice.. tt concluded our day. went back to the hotel to sleep bcoz we were all so tired. slept for almost 12hrs till the next day!