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After ten fantastic days of acclimatization, enjoying the city and going out a lot, it was time to find an apartment and getting ready for Peking University. On Sunday during my long search for five minutes, a message popped up on the Facebook page of our exchange (yes we have Facebook here, thanks to the VPN of Tilburg University :). The message was from a small cute Norwegian girl, who looked for a flat mate. Exactly in the area I wanted to live in, between the university and the lively student area Wudaokou. One phone call, a taxi ride of €2,30 and forty minutes later, I had an apartment!!! Yes lucky bastard, were the words of many people who had been looking for an apartment like this for many days.
Two days after that was the introduction and the registration on the campus of Peking University, which they call “Beda” here. The campus is huge and beautiful, with its big lake, small bridges and old Chinese style buildings.

The main building of our business school: Guanghua School of Management is, on top of that, the fanciest one of all. Registration and the campus tour where not impressive, however
the class room looked like a small government conference room (2e kamer for our Dutch readers).

During this day I immediately met a lot of cool people like Zach and Eric from Canada, Jeff and Ben from the US, Natalie from Italy and Sharika from India. We all decided to eat together and go out afterwards. Gisa, the student organization, arranged this dinner and a memorable evening followed. This was the fundament for the nice friendships I build up here. You get to learn people really fast here, everybody is on the same page, within the same phase of life, the same kind of ambitions and interests.

Gisa also organizes trips like an outdoor training, to the great wall and the forbidden city. I would recommend the outdoor training, although the activities were not all that, the laughs and drinks at night made it all worth it. We got to know each other even better with 70 people just outside Beijing for two days and one night. This is the beginning of an awesome time in Beijing and the rest of China, because staying in Beijing alone is not what I plan to do, but more of that in one of my next posts.