So, I honestly don't know where to begin! The last few weeks has been pretty eventful, and weird to say the least. Warning in advance, this is going to be a massively tedious read for a lot of people, but a hilarious one for me and the people involved. Although I hope my ramblings let you in a bit on the craziest time I've had in a while. The question is, where to start.. and I guess the best place to would be my flight out here.

It's a bit different when you fly to China, as I soon found out. You have to wait in a pretty big queue and sort out your visa. In this queue I was one of only two western people, in a sea of manic Chinese people. My personal highlights were a couple dressed in matching burberry shirts, a man who - no joke - whistled the song from Kill Bill (you know the one I mean, apologies if it's now in your head too) continually, for an hour straight, and a man who spat on the floor of the airport. At this point in the airport, I learnt my first lesson for China: Always push back. The culture over here is very different, and the people tend to just push past you if you're in their way. That being said, getting through security was certainly an experience.

So, after being shoved by several small Chinese ladies in a queue for forty five minutes, I finally made it on the plane. I ended up sitting next to a guy from up north who was also going out to teach, and was nervous to say the least. The plane journey was relatively uneventful, and suddenly I woke up and suddenly we were nearly in Beijing, all be it a long 10 hours later.

After getting off the plane, I got through immigration really quickly (probably because they thought I was Lady Gaga and didn't want to make a scene). When I got my backpack through, I noticed that my padlock had been cut off. There was nothing missing from my bag, although I came to the conclusion that they saw my teabags in there, and assumed I was a drugs smuggler. I'm sure they were disappointed to find a bag full of PG tips.

We were greeted by an enthusiastic girl who worked for TTC and told that we would have to go over to another terminal, to pick up the rest of the gang. After a 10 hour flight, and being awake for over 24 hours, I wasn't too excited about the prospect of socialising, but everyone was really nice. We all made our way over to the University where we were given a welcome pack and information about our course, etc. That first night was pretty uneventful, other than trying to work out how to order a meal in a restaurant, while being laughed at by everyone in the place.

The next week all seems to roll into one big blur of learning, getting drunk and forgetting what I'd learnt, and posing for photos with excitable Chinese people. Seeing as I definitely can't remember the chronological order of any of the said events, I'm just going to write about the more interesting/funny things that happened, with a few educational pieces thrown in to please the family (yes granddad, I know you're reading this - please don't judge me).

It is at this point that I have to mention the coffee shop. Anyone reading this, from UIBE will understand the love affair that we all had with a quaint little place called 'SIT Coffee'. It was our only source of internet, and the waitresses has quirky names like 'Mango', and they served pretty amazing western style food! It was the spot most days, for hangovers or general boredom. Just down the road, was a bar called 'Lakers' where you could write all over the walls and even pull the ceilings down, as long as you were having fun they didn't seem to mind!

One of the more tedious things that we had to do was to go to the visa office and sort out our extensions. Getting bored of waiting around, I headed into Beijing with a couple of boys and got some street food from what can only be described as a shed. The lady inside proceeded to shout numbers at us, until we finally agreed on a price for some dumplings. They were of course, amazing. The cheaper the food here, the nicer it seems to be. There's always a risk of course, but - touch wood - I haven't been sick yet! That night we ended up going to a place called Wangfujing, and sampling the delights of Chinese street food of a very different nature. The infamous kebab sticks of scorpion, tarantula, snake, silk worms, sea horse (which made me really sad) and lizard, to name a few. The scorpion tasted like pork scratchings, while the snake tasted kind of like (apologies in advance for the huge generalisation) chicken. The tarantula was, well.. an experience. The funniest example of foods which are better left uneaten, was dog penis. Yes, the penis of a dog, on a stick. It looked (and smelt) disgusting, and from the faces of the people who ate it, it tasted equally awful.

A personal highlight for me, was our weekly outing to a club in Beijing called 'Propaganda'. Four words - all you can drink. That's not the best part though, it was all you can drink for the equivelent of £3. Yes, three English pounds. As you can imagine, the nights were pretty messy, and for fears of embarrassing people, as well as - lets face it - myself, I wont divulge too much information! What I will say is, a night out in China is awesome. The people are super friendly, the drinks are cheap, and the music is old school. The Chinese boys are hilarious, asking you if you'd like a Chinese boyfriend, telling you that you're 'beautifuuuuuul' and of course, no night would be complete without a Lady Gaga related comment. There's also a KFC just near the club, which was always a stop off on the way home. The KFC experience here is different to say the least, with questionable chicken, and vegetables in the burgers.

I can't for the life of me even remember when I first started writing this blog, but what I can say is that the date is now the 20th of February. Up until last Friday, I was staying in Beijing at the University of Business Economics, with 150 other people - who I miss an awful lot by the way! We all did our weekend TEFL training course, which was supposed to give us an insight into teaching, and some ideas on how to plan our lessons. The course itself was pretty good, my favourite part was speaking to a past intern, who told us that she was placed at a school down South called w***or School' haha. It was also during this weekend course that I found out that one of my friends, had a very unfortunate tattoo error. She thought she had 'Leanne' tattooed on her back, but she found out it actually said 'Happy Lantern Festival Beijing'. Hilarious to say the least.

We did a fair bit of sightseeing over the two weeks, including the Forbidden City. While it was beautiful, it didn't particularly blow me away. It was however my first experience of the Chinese obsession with my hair. I had to stop and pose for photos with excitable young Chinese girls, and families who would force their children into pictures with me. This only got worse on our tour day to the Great Wall, where they would stop me every few steps and ask me for a photo. I've even had people coming up to me and stroking my hair, it's all pretty surreal!

There has been one occasion thus far where I have nearly died. This happened on the night of the Chinese lantern festival - funnily enough. Here in China, they set off fireworks and firecrackers on the pavement, so if one goes off you have to pray that it's not close to you. This particular night, a rogue firework hurtled towards us, and exploded within inches of my friend. It was ridiculously scary, but as with everything in China, so funny. The thing about being in China is, you have to learn to chill out and take everything with a pinch of salt.

I'm at my school now, and will write about it in good time! Apologies for the lack of wit in this, I know you were all expecting great things! I'll try my best to keep on top of this blog malarkey and write it regularly! If there's one thing I'd like to leave on, it's this - I haven't even been here a month, but for what it's worth, I'm having a ball. Things go wrong every single day out here, without fail and China is the strangest, most confusing place I've ever been - but I can't help but love it.