My first night in Beijing

My first day here was crazy. I hadn´t slept in several hours but anyway I was very awake. I took a taxi and when I arrived to my dormitory I asked for the key of the room I had reserved before. In this moment I started to understand the behaviour of Chinese people. They are quite people, they don´t hurry when talking but they do when they need to go somewhere. Sometimes it is even tired to discuss with them, they pretend that they don´t understand, but you should keep on trying, never give up. Well, after 30 minutes trying to explain them who we were and what we wanted (thanks to my Spanish-Chinese guide) finally we got the key of the room. Rooms are new, so new that the light, electricity, internet was not working.
It took a while to understand how everything works, and one week later we still don´t have a fridge. It is amazing that in the kitchen you have to insert the card of the room in a place to use the water in the sink and the pots and pans to cook must be induction system. After leaving our stuff in the room, we decided to walk around in our area and the uni campus. First thing I noticed was the contamination clouds in the city: it doesn´t smell but it is visible. After that, I had to be really careful to cross the road because here there are no rules: people and cars don´t follow the traffic lights instructions. In my walk around I discovered a Carrefour store, but even if it is very big, it is crazy to discover that everything is Chinese food. It is kind of funny to buy stuff when you have no idea of Chinese. Fortunately there is an international corner where you can find some things that are not available in china, for example chocolate bars, cheese, olive oil, tomato sauce, olives…
The first night I met some international students and we went to have dinner to a Chinese restaurant. It took about 20 minutes to tell the waiter what we wanted (always using the Chinese dictionary) but finally we did it. In a few minutes (the restaurants serve you surprisingly fast) we had a big pan in the middle filled of a kind of soup with vegetables and lots of meat slices to dip inside. There are no knifes or forks in the Chinese restaurants so we tried to eat with the wood sticks. All the people in the restaurant were looking at us and the waiters were bringing us more and more food every time. We really had a nice time and the best was the price: around 2.5 euros per person.