Freddie and I are sitting in our two-person flat in the Wudaokou (五道口) district of Beijing, where we have been living since the 24th August, and we have little intention of going outside today. The 'Air Index Quality' has risen to 220 ('Very Unhealthy' on the US Embassy website: http://tinyurl.com/BJ-air-quality ), but we need only to look out of our 16th-floor window to see the gravity of the situation. We can barely see the buildings opposite and the mountains on the horizon have become virtually non-existent. Consequently, with nothing else to do, I now have no excuse but to update this blog with the events of the last few weeks.

A day after the last entry, we moved into our flat in the Huaqingjiayuan compound (华清嘉园), a series of apartment blocks inhabited by students as well as locals. It wasn't in the cleanest state, so in order to spruce it up, Freddie and I went to the shopping centre across the road, known as 'Lotus.' We filled a trolley with groceries, spending over ¥1000 (about £100), before realising we lacked enough arms to carry everything back. Thinking quickly, we wheeled the trolley out of the shop, carried it down the stairs onto the street (being careful to avoid the security guards), across the busy road, weaving between rickshaws and taxis before we got back to Huaqingjiayuan. When the guard of our compound saw us arrive with a fully-loaded trolley, he opened the barrier for us to let us through, allowing us to take the whole thing back to our room, where it stayed for half the day before we bothered to take it back to the shop (the alternative being keeping it as a permanent feature of our apartment).

After a few days, we realised a vacuum cleaner was essential, so I went again to Lotus with Julianna (who was visiting at this point). We asked one of the members of staff where we could find a hoover, (吸尘机 in Chinese - a word I will never forget) and she indicated towards a machine that looked very much like one. Not knowing the characters for '吸尘机 ' I didn't bother to read the description on the box and hastily brought it back to the flat. It was only when I was unpacking and saw that it came with a clothes hanger that I began to get suspicious. I finally looked up the characters on the box and it turned out I hadn't bought a vacuum cleaner, but a suit steamer. Outraged, Julianna and I grabbed the box and receipt and brought it back to Lotus, where we spent an agonising hour and a half going through the process of getting a refund, which was exacerbated by the fact that it was entirely done in Chinese and every member of staff was extremely vague about what we had to do next. We ran all around the shop, getting a piece of paper signed and stamped by what felt like the entire population of Beijing. At one point, it sparked an argument between a low-ranking shop assistant and the manager, who shouted at each other in the Beijing dialect, with us barely understanding a word. Finally, we headed back to the refund counter, having collected enough stamps and signatures, only to be told we couldn't have a refund because we didn't have receipt. It then occurred to me that one of the stampers and signers (a security guard) had thoughtlessly taken the receipt away. When we found him, he denied ever having taken away a receipt, even when we pointed out a receipt with a suit steamer which he had on his table next to him. Finally, we were able to take the receipt and the ¥500 we spent was returned to us.

Disgusted, I gave up on my quest to buy a hoover and asked Rainbow if she had the telephone number of a cleaner. She put me in contact with someone called 'Auntie Liu' (刘阿姨), who apparently we could call 'Auntie' for short. With her help, the flat was restored to an acceptable level of cleanliness (and she only charged ¥20 an hour).

Julianna arrived on the 26th August and stayed until the 8th September. During her stay, we visited all the main tourist attractions in the city, Instagramming many photos in the process (some of them are on her profile - worth a look but please ignore the embarrassing photos of me http://instagram.com/juliannayau ). Places we went to included the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, Houhai (后海, a lake) and many clothing and souvenir markets, where my skill of haggling in Chinese was tested over and over again. Whilst in Houhai, we went into one of the many souvenir shops, which supposedly was closing down the next day. The shop keepers were desperately running around, selling products for whatever price they could. Seizing the opportunity, we bought endless piles of decorations for the flat. When we finally decided to leave over an hour later, our arms filled with endless Chinese paraphernalia which we'd ferociously haggled down, I suddenly noticed a vase with a porcelain dragon coiled around it going for only ¥150 (£15). When the shopkeepers noticed me looking at it, they asked if I was interested in buying it. Jokingly, I said I'd give them ¥50 for it, not really wanting to burden myself with a vase that would be a nightmare to take back. Surprisingly, they then agreed to sell it for ¥60. Whilst it was being wrapped, five shopkeepers crowded around me, realising I could literally be talked into buying anything, so long as the price was low enough. They told me I should buy the exact same vase again, so the two could be symmetrically placed. I laughed at the suggestion, saying I'd only buy it for ¥30 (three pounds!), to which - unbelievably - they agreed. When I first came to Houhai, as a naïve seventeen year-old, my friends and I were tricked out of several hundred Yuan. Having returned to Houhai and bought a porcelain vase for three pounds, I was extremely satisfied. Obviously, taking the subway back to Wudaokou with two vases was out of the question, so we took a taxi.

The next day, Julianna and I went back to Houhai to take a pedal boat on the lake again (an activity I highly recommend), when we got the idea of visiting the same shop to see if it had actually closed down. It was still open, but half of the products had been packed away. The staff were ecstatic when they saw me and, predictably, we ended up buying even more. Our flat decoration now includes: eleven Peking opera masks, four Buddha statues, a poster depicting a scene in Peking opera, a poster depicting the characters from the novel 'the Water Margin,' a Shan shui wall hanging, another wall hanging with the Kangxi Emperor, the Chinese board game 'Go,' a traditional tea set, a ten-metre scroll depicting the city of Suzhou in the Qing Dynasty (here is an online version http://tinyurl.com/suzhou-scroll) and two porcelain vases with dragons coiled around them.

Another feature of our flat is the 'Jar of Tomfoolery' (the actual name is ruder, but for the sake of the blog we have censored it). Every time a person in the flat makes a 'foolish' comment, they must donate ¥2 to the jar, and record an entry into the log book. The money in the jar will be spent on further decorations of the flat.

The most striking site that Julianna and I visited was the '9th China International Garden Expo' (园博园) which is a huge park in the south-west of Beijing filled with reconstructions of traditional Chinese gardens and buildings, where we took endless photos (for an idea of just how big it is : http://tinyurl.com/yuanboyuan). We went during a weekday, so it was nearly empty, and we were free to photograph the most amazing traditional gardens, best of all were the southern-style (江南) gardens (see the photos provided). There was however a low point of the Garden Expo and that was the international section (which isn't really international). It's merely a collection of messy, clumsily-made gardens covered in stalls, selling souvenirs, with typically pestilential shopkeepers. One of the stalls offered photos in the country's traditional dress, which Julianna was eager to do (it turned out to be North-Korean national dress). We found the photographer asleep at his desk in a Korean-style pavilion, with a speaker next to his head, blasting out adverts on loop in the most infuriating way. When he woke up, he hurriedly pulled my clothes off and replaced them with Korean garbs. He then photographed us in front of the Pakistani stand and various other unfitting areas. He then attempted to rip us off, but being experienced in such situations, we negotiated the price down to something more reasonable. One of the better attractions in the international section was a reconstruction of a Norman castle, but upon closer inspection it wasn't so impressive, the walls turning out to be hollow and cheaply-built.

On the 2nd September, we went to Beijing University for the first time, were we were given a welcome lunch with the Chinese class from Oxford and our class representative (班长, as they have in China) Coirle, was burdened with the frightful task of giving a speech in Chinese, which she pulled off! It turned out that our first week of term was fresher's week and we wouldn't actually have lessons until the ninth. I met my language exchange partner, called Antonio or Bobo in Chinese (波波), who gave Julianna and me a tour of the university campus. His description of life at Beijing University was similar to what one might imagine for a university that admits only the top fraction of the most intelligent Chinese students. When he showed us around the northern part of the campus, which used to be a Qing Dynasty garden connected with the Summer Palace, he said, "I actually don't spend much time here. The only places I spend my time are in the library, the canteen and the dormitory." When I asked him where he stayed when he wasn't at university, he didn't understand the question, so I asked him where his family was from. He said, "My family are from Shanxi, but I don't visit them often. I've only spent five days at home this year." When he showed us the university lake, he said, "People have killed themselves here because of academic pressure." I asked him if he listened to Peking opera, he said, "My grandfather listens to Peking Opera, but I prefer western music, such as Justin Bieber." He then told me how the garden was more beautiful until it was partially burned down and plundered by the British in the Second Opium War (I wasn't sure whether he expected a personal apology from me).

On 9th September, we started lessons, which include newspaper reading, oral and classical Chinese. Each lesson is two hours long (!), so we have a joyous eight hours of classical Chinese (taught in modern Chinese) every week. This year we will be studying the four most famous Chinese novels: Dream of the Red Chamber, the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West and the Water Margin. We have started with 'Dream of the Red Chamber' and I don't understand a thing.

One high point of our course is that we have three-day weekends. We have already booked tickets for a weekend in Inner Mongolia on the 19th.