Harrow International School Exchange - March/April 2016

Day 1
Today was our first day in Beijing. We were all really excited. I still can't believe I'm actually in China. Here's a brief summary of what we did today-

We got up at 8 in the morning and went down to get breakfast. Jennifer and I had some toast, fried eggs, and these 'steam points', which are like spongy dumplings...I liked them...   At 10:30, we took the bus to Tiananmen Square, a popular shopping place... We looked around the square, and visited a tea shop, where we tried some tea...     After that, we visited a Chinese art gallery and bought stuff from the shop.

We had a packed lunch outside the Forbidden City.    We then visited the Forbidden City, built in the 1400s to house the emperor, and make sure no common citizen saw him. According to legend, it has 9999 rooms. If a newborn baby were to sleep in a different room every night, it'd be 27 years old when it runs out of rooms.

To get a good view of the city, we went to Jingshan Park. We encountered the Beijing Opera, a group of friendly people performing classic Chinese songs. They sang a song especially for us as a welcome. We had to climb loads of steps.  We took the subway back to the hotel. We were given 30 mins of free time before we left again for dinner. We ate at a hot-pot restaurant; the food was really good. As we ate, there were a few solo performers entertaining us: a man in an intricate blue 'dress', a ribbon dancer, And a noodle person.

To conclude, I enjoyed today. We're all a little nervous about going to school tomorrow...

Day 2 

Today was our first day at Harrow International School.

We started our day by a tour of the school and met our buddies for the trip - they were very friendly and welcoming . Then we did some activities with them to get to know the groups properly and had some lessons . At the end of the school day, we all went to our extra curricular activities - some of us did sport like badminton or running, and some did computing club. Once we had finished our school activity, we went to dinner at a traditional Chinese restaurant near the school which gave us a chance to try the unique foods they had to offer. We all thought it was delicious!!

We're all enjoying our trip so far - look out for our next installment!

Day 3Today was our third full day at Harrow International School, Beijing.

We started off our day with a House Assembly led by one of the six school houses - Curie. Then we went to our first two periods before going off to break to buy some drinks and something to eat. Then we had some more lessons and lunch, which is very nice for school food! After that, we had two more lessons but today did not do our LIAs (compulsory extra curricular); instead, after our last lesson, which for most of us was Mandarin, we went to get changed and then headed off for the Olympic Park.

When we got there we walked around for a minute and looked at the different buildings whilst the teachers bought us our tickets. Then we headed into the track field stadium and looked around and took some pictures. This was a very good experience for most of us as we had never been here before (apart from the HISB students).

Then we went to Watercube which has a very large inside water park which looked very fun but was not open, sad for most of us. We looked around for a short time and went back out then headed to the shopping centre. The four schools split up to eat in our school groups then meet up afterwards and met back at 7.30pm.

After a good and hard four or five days of traditional Chinese food (which tastes very different to our takeaways back home) we thought it would be great to have a break and settle down with a lovely McDonalds for all of us RMS girls - which looked like the case for the John Lyon boys aswell. After food we could walk around and do some shopping for as long as we had left.

While most people were out looking round many different shops, Freya and I decided to spend our time at ONE shop, a small phone case stall where Freya would tell me what cases were nice or not and us two trying to get the man to lower the price from 200 yuen. It worked, obviously! After that we headed home after a long day out and ready for school tomorrow.

Day 5
Today we visited the Summer Palace.

It was first built in the 12th century as an imperial palace for the King and It is the largest imperial garden existing in China. It was very beautiful.  After that we went to the Beijing Drum Tower and we watched a show. It was really good, but very loud! After the Drum tower we went shopping in Hutong, it was very busy but there was lots of cool things to buy. We went to dinner at a dumpling restaurant, it was delicious. We came back to the hotel by train.

We had a very fun day, we are all very tired

We started off the day off by going to school as usual.

However at 2:00 in the afternoon we got off the bus and went to the lama temple. The bus dropped us off just outside the temple, we got our tickets and went inside. The temple was colourful! There was loads of beautiful and interesting statues of The Buddha. One of the statues we saw was made out of one tree and it was massive!

After we left we went to make our own dinner! We made dumpling with a little help with our cooking teachers. They tasted great! After a long day we made our safe journey home back to the hotel.

Day 6Today was Saturday which meant we could finally have a lie in :) At 10 O'clock we all left the hotel and headed straight for the shopping center!! We all found the shopping center was quite expensive however this did stop us from buying clothes, sweets and presents to bring home.

After we had finished our shopping we all got back on the bus for an hour and a half coach journey to the Great Wall. When we arrived we walked through a street market selling lots of souvenirs, then we decided to take a lunch break at 'subway' only to find after queuing for 15 minutes that 'Subway' had ran out of bread. Luckily there was a pizza restaurant next door.

After lunch we got on another bus which took us to the cable cars. The cable cars had an amazing view of the mountains and the Great Wall. When we got of the cable cars we walked up a few stairs and then onto the wall. We took lots of pictures including the view, the wall, selfies and 'High School Musical' jumps. We walked a little bit longer than a mile across the wall before finally arriving at the toboggan slide. Unfortunately we had just missed the last ride of the day, so we took the chair lifts down which were just as fun.

When we got back down to the bottom we took the bus back to market street where we had 20 minutes of shopping time to buy souvenirs. For some of us, this was our first attempt at bargaining which was very successful for all of us and really fun. We bought lots of fridge magnets, toy pandas, chopsticks, key chains and 'I love Beijing' t-shirts.

Then we got back on the bus which took us back to the hotel. We dropped off our bags in the room and then headed out for dinner. We all decided that we hadn't had enough Italian food today, so we went a Italian restaurant and ate lots of pasta, cheesecake and tiramisu.

Day 9

 When we arrived at school this morning the girls were directed to the Theatre.

As it was international women's day the school held a breakfast for all the girls and their mothers. It was very interesting listening to the point of views of different women and we all learnt a new fact about women and girls. After this we went to our lessons. Our first lesson was Maths and second English. In Maths we were creating presentations in groups to explain what we have done in Maths these last two weeks.

In English we were creating a comic strip in groups as well as designing a super hero and a villain. After break I had art which I really enjoy at this school. We were drawing two totally different objects and turning it into one design.

My fourth lesson was Biology and we were learning about the effects of smoking. In pairs we had to design a poster explaining the effects of smoking.

Once we had eaten lunch we all got on the coach and arrived at The Temple of Heaven. The temple was very pretty and it was really interesting to hear about the history of the building. Some of the trees around the temple were around 800 years old there fore they are some of the oldest trees in China. We made our way out of the temple of heaven and made our way to the market. You could get anything in the market but if you made eye contact with someone on a stall they would drag you in and make sure that you bought something from them.

We then made our way to a Kung-fu show at the Red Theatre. It was such an amazing show and there was not a second where I was bored! We then headed home and went to bed, ready for engineering day.

Day 10Today at school we had Engineering Day. In our houses we had to design and build things from set materials.

The first was a Rube-Goldberg machine to pop a balloon. A Rube-Goldberg machine involves a series of chain reactions to accomplish a simple task at the end. The winner was the house that popped the balloon with the most steps. Only two houses managed to pop the balloon so they came first and second.
After break, we had to build a raft. This was harder because there were so many completely different ideas and we had no way to test them. We had four bottles and there planks of wood and we need to get someone across the swimming pool(while staying dry!). We chose a triangular formation for our raft, as did some other groups. Others chose a different idea. Although we got someone across the pool, we did not do it fast so we lost.

We had lunch and then we went back for our final project. We had to build a timer. We had to make something that gave a signal after 60 seconds. The winner would be the ones closest to that time. People had different ideas, using water, fire and salt to measure the time. Curie and John Lyon drew for first, both with a time of 1 minute and 1 second.

After school we did Chinese drumming, which made everyone deaf. We learnt how to drum, but the room was very loud. Afterwards we had a spare hour before going to dinner with our buddies. We went to a     restaurant where the duck was really good. Afterward we went back to the hotel