Life in Beijing is beginning to feel normal. Well…I should probably rephrase that. Life in Beijing is beginning to feel slightly more normal than it did 3 weeks ago when I first arrived. That is to say, I am no longer surprised to see a car speeding the wrong way down a cycle lane (which incidentally is leading my shortlist for Near-Death Experience of the Month). And whilst I haven’t landed the role of Adolf yet (see previous post), it has been another eventful week in the world capital of insane drivers.

Beijing has gone all autumnal. The humidity of the summer months has all but gone, and the crisp, clear blue skies of Beijing’s best season have arrived. With perfect conditions for exploring the beautiful countryside that lies beyond Beijing’s 6th ring-road, I jumped on my bike and headed to the west of Beijing University. After 2 hours cycling, I came across a ghost town. The area had been completely abandoned, except for a small primary school which was squeezed between the debris and rubble. I happened to arrive as class was ending for the day and got chatting to a parent. He said the government ran out of money during the construction of the neighbourhood, but they had decided to keep the school. I cycled on and saw some kids playing in the wreckage. They ran over to me, excitedly shouting the term of ‘endearment’ directed at all foreigners in China, laowai (老外), literally meaning ‘always foreigner’. One kid was not so happy to see me; he told me that my eyes were gui (鬼), ‘ghostly’. I asked him why. He said it was because I was a laowai. Touché.

On Thursday we went to the Huguang Theatre to watch some Peking Opera. Now I consider myself to be fairly open-minded when it comes to art in general. However, Peking Opera didn’t do it for me. Not in the slightest. Firstly, it’s not opera. I am no authority on opera, but what I heard and saw on Thursday night was certainly not opera. The only way I can describe it – if you haven’t seen it before – is to imagine a petulant 6-year old child who has been given a selection of pots and pans and then told to make as much noise as possible. One of stories we heard/saw was that of the Monkey King, which involved a man dressed up in red and black running around with a stick looking for a fan. If I sound like an uneducated moron who ‘missed the point’, go see it for yourself, and THEN tell me I’m wrong.

This week I have managed to get a job teaching English to a 10-year old boy, Peter. I met the family when I was house hunting and finally got in contact with them this week. I had never taught English before and one hour before the lesson I was frantically googling ‘good learning english games for 10-year olds’. I realised that despite having learned French, Spanish, Italian and Chinese, I had never actually had to think about learning things like tenses, grammar etc. in my own language. It felt very strange looking up how to teach the present tense in English. The lesson went very well until we got onto a fifteen minute discussion about how you distinguish between ‘you singular’ and ‘you plural’ in English. In Chinese, for ‘you’ you say ni (你), and for the plural you just add a plural marker men, nimen (你们). Peter asked me how you would know whether somebody meant you (singular) or you (plural) in English. A very good question. The sort of question Sam laoshi (Teacher Sam) really didn’t want in his first ever English class. I told him that most of the time you can guess from the context, but he was having none of it. After much debate, I told him: ‘Let’s pick this up again next week.’ A sentence that has served crashing and burning teachers since time began.

In other news, I have signed up for the Beijing Half-Marathon. The decision to sign-up was made in a bar…after a few drinks. My training began officially yesterday with a seven-hour hike organised by Beijing Hikers, a group that meets every weekend for hikes around Beijing (Funny that, a company called Beijing Hikers doing hikes around Beijing). We went to a place called Dahaituo Shan (大海坨山) which sits on the border of Yanqing and Hebei province, and the 2,198m peak we climbed is the second-highest in Beijing. The countryside was stunning and photos will be up soon on both facebook and the photos page. On the long walk to the summit, we bumped into a man chanting a Buddhist mantra from memory. I half expected to see an iPhone in his hand with the ‘lyrics’ as he kept going for about 30 minutes. About two hours later we saw him again and he was still chanting!!! We concluded that he must have been on a loop.

Finally, this week I decided to name my blog ‘狂人日记’, meaning ‘Diary of a Madman’. It is a reference to a short story by the most famous Chinese writer of 20th century, Lu Xun (鲁迅). The story is about a man who thinks people in his village want to eat him. (If you are interested, you can read about the story here). In truth, there has been very little thought behind the decision to call my blog this, except for the fact that every good blog needs a pretentious title…