31st August - 1st September: Flight and Arriva

After landing in Egypt I finally realized that I am indeed going to be away from Germany, home and friends for another year. Although I am incredibly excited to be on this wonderful journey with Nina (a good friend of mine who‘s going to spend her exchange year in Beijing with me), let me tell you something about the bathrooms at the airport in Cairo… Let‘s say that I had to think of China as soon as I entered a stall. Well, they did have „western toilets“ but no paper, not as clean as I thought it would be, I mean, it‘s the airport! At least they had soap, I guess…

Oh, and when we wanted to exchange money in order to buy some water, we already went through this control to wait for our flight to Beijing. But you could only exchange money before this control and when we asked where we could exchange some money, people told us „Outside of the gate“ but with our plane ticket/passport/whatever we weren‘t allowed to go outside! I guess we were lucky that this guy from this control thingy was nice enough (or just really bored) to let us go back, so we could get some money to buy stuff.

To pass time, both of us worked a bit on our essays for university, which we weren‘t able to finish before going to Beijing. And Nina was about to vandalize the wall because they miswrote a Chinese character. (should have been 飲）

After landing in Beijing the smog welcomed us and we managed to get to our university. The bus driver was incredibly friendly and even drove us to the front of the university, even though he didn‘t have to. We arrived on the west side of the campus and the guardman told us to go to the east side, so we had to cross the road and tried to find the building in which we thought we would live in (luckily an auntie took care of our luggage and drove it to that building, while we were walking there, for only 10 Yuan). Unfortunately, our names weren‘t on the list! And after a short discussion we had to walk to the other side of the campus to the end of the west side… As if that wasn‘t bad enough it started raining quite heavily and when we finally arrived at our destination we were basically drenched. In the end, we got a room and for now Nina and I are roommates. The room isn‘t too bad and a lot cleaner than imagined. Same goes for the bathroom (although there‘s no paper or soap).

Here's a picture of our room: