Beijing Day 2

A day of such simple activities! But of course to us it’s all so surreal that everything we do or see just astonishes us. Richard came round in the morning to take us to University for a look around. The campus is huge, theres so much going on there. They have the equivalent of halls on the campus grounds, and it makes me moan less about the ridiculous price that we have to pay for our apartment as I’d rather be here than sharing a small single room with 3 other people. I’m beginning to appreciate their culture so much more already, it just doesn’t seem to bother them that they have to do that.

Our first visit to BIFT

Our new Uni for the next 3 months.

Just your average meeting room!

Entrance

“Library” 😀

We were introduced to our new course organiser who thought we were cute for wanting to do everything she suggested for us to learn! We now have our timetables for this coming week and we’re all going to be split up, which is ever so slightly terrifying! But a really good thing too at the same time. After our meeting, we went to the campus canteen. Like I was saying- such a simple thing to do. It wouldn’t even cross our minds back home, but here it was such a different world! Not a chip in sight, just fresh, authentic food, barely anything I recognised. It’s all so exciting! We were also introduced to one of the students on the course who speaks enough english to get by. His British name is HongBon, but I can’t remember what his real name is! He was so helpful and we’ve all become quite good friends with him now. He’s been showing us around over the weekend and taking us to restaurants, making sure we know where to go and what to do.

One massive canteen.

Ordinary canteen food! Nothing like ordinary to us! Mmm, so tasty.

Proper tourists.

We were taken to a supermarket as we needed to stock up in our kitchen, but we could not have done it without Richard and HongBon. I picked up a bottle which could have been anything from laundry detergent to soy sauce so we had absolutely no idea what anything was! Everything is in Chinese symbols so you can’t even get an idea of what anything says. But that’s all part of the experience! We met up with a few more girls from the course that night, a few more English speakers. Lucia, Tina and Zoe. (Again, not their real names!) They’ve been so lovely and have again become quite good friends. We went for a meal that night and they’ve been taking us out and showing us around like HongBon has done, they’re also going to be in some of our classes over the next few weeks.

Lucia, Zoe and Tina

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So that’s day 2! A day of simple things that we would do ordinarily in England but all such a parallel from what we’re used to, packed full of seeing new sights, sounds, smells, busy streets, city lights and new people. Another incredible day.

Erasmus Exchange to Beijing 2016- Day 1

I’ve been meaning to update my blog for the past three days as there’s been so much going on so I’ve needed to do a  daily update! I just haven’t had the time, what a whirlwind!!

It’s been an extremely eventful few days, crazy, fun, exciting, new, alien, and totally terrifying all at once. It’s been incredible though. We’ve been here a matter of days and we have already fallen in love with this fantastic city! We feel like proper tourists, taking photos of what is probably considered your average restaurant, cafe, shop, building, statue, anything like that! But it’s all so new to us that we just have to do the tourist thing. I’m really glad we’ve been allowed some time to settle in and let our bodies overcome the jet lag! Term started on Monday the 5th and it’s now Saturday the 10th and we’ve still got until this Monday to get our heads together before we start uni. I haven’t even finished unpacking yet!

This trip has been incredibly last minute, we couldn’t book our flights until our visa and passports came through the post and we couldn’t send them off until we had received an acceptance document form from Beijing, and that came very late! So in the end, we got our visas back the day before we planned to fly out, and didn’t receive our tickets until the morning of the day we left. Talk about last minute! Thank goodness for Natasha in the International Office, what a gem she’s been. So I set off from home in the morning and after a long train journey down south including navigating the London underground on my own for the first time in my life (which was sadly really exciting for me…) I arrived in Heathrow and was joined very shortly after by Rosie and Tori. It was so nice to see them because we’d only been messaging since we all found out that we were going to Beijing together and hadn’t seen each other in that time. It was nerves all round but also massive excitement! We had a long wait in the airport but had a lot to catch up on and a few celebratory cocktails to pass the time. The flight was long, 10 hours overnight and uncomfortable! When we got into the airport we had a woman coming to meet us there called Dana. (her real name is Gu Linxu) She was so warm and welcoming! Insisting on taking some of our bags for us, leading us out to the car and taking us to our accommodation. We met the Chinese equivalent of Natasha at the International Office, who’s name was Richard. (Also not his real name!) He was also very welcoming and helped us settle into our new apartment before taking us out for our first Chinese meal. Even going to sit in your ordinary bog standard walk in restaurant was an experience all on its own! There was no chance we could have managed there without the help of Richard and Dana.

Getting excited! Our first fews of Beijing.

All so new! Taking a train through the airport.

The view from the bottom of our apartment block.

New and amazing! Local restaurant.

Goodbyes with my mum in Skipton train station. That platform seems to be my personal gateway to the world!

On our way! Beijing here we come!

Our first restaurant and Chinese meal.

Settling into our new apartment

<—  Richard!

We settled into our flat and chilled out for the rest of the night. Jet- leg set in pretty quickly and I fell asleep mid- sentence while writing my diary! For our first day though, we had seen and done such a lot without even thinking about it. The sights, smells, culture, people, everything is just incredible and so new and amazing. It’s going to take a while to settle in here I think, I reckon it’ll be difficult with the huge language barrier, but hopefully with the help of the few English speakers we’re now in contact with we should have all the help we need!

Summer Work

This summer has just been one busy whirlwind of non-stop hectic-ness from the word go! I had so many plans of things to do while having a break from university. I wanted to complete a drawing a week at least, begin learning a language, experiment with my new sewing machine, paint, complete a batch of artist research to add to my folder, so much stuff! But I also needed to work. I knew from the start that year 2 was gong to be quite an expensive one for me so I wanted to make sure I was prepped with lots of money to take with me to uni. I’ve been very lucky this summer, I decided quite a while back that I had worked in catering in various pubs, cafes and restaurants for far too long and it was all I’d ever known in the working world. I was desperate to try something new and something relevant to what I’m studying at university, so I set about trying to find myself a job in something I would like a bit more! After looking for jobs in Textiles and having no luck, I tried to find a job in retail. Not quite what I was after but it would have been a lot more relevant to my studies and got me out of catering. I couldn’t even find anything in that industry! My plan for summer was very complicated because I had planned a weeks holiday to Morocco with the surf society, and immediately after that I had to go home because we had to move out of halls, and weren’t able to move into our new house before the 1st of July. So I had to find a job before leaving for Cardiff on my holiday and I had to find it for when I returned to Cardiff, which made my situation even more difficult! I began to get very worried as it got far too close to the time that I was meant to leave, and I still had no job.

Then miracle of miracles, Keireine emailed me with a job opportunity in Barry at an Industrial Stitching Company! Before I knew it I had got in touch, sent off my CV, got an interview and bagged myself the job! Panic over! When I arrived back in Cardiff and settled into my new house, I began work at Stitch In Time. They were able to offer me overtime for a while and as I had completely run out of money I took everything I got, 55 hours a week with a good hour and a half travelling every Monday to Friday. I love the hard work but it left me very little time to myself as the weekends were spent trying to catch up with shopping, cleaning, general house work, proper exercise and a little bit of rest time too! I had very little time to do any real work for university which has been quite disappointing, but I have managed to do a few things and I am happy with the few bits I have accomplished during my time away from university.

During my summer, I had another email from Keireine, who was offering me the opportunity to get involved with the experience of a lifetime! The chance to travel to Beijing and study at the Institute of Fashion Technology for 3 months during the first term of my second year. I applied out of interest mainly! I never thought it would actually go ahead, but 2 months on and here I am writing my blog with terrible jet-lag, in a fab apartment on the sixth floor of a block of flats in one of the biggest cities in the world. I’m so excited!! But it’s taken a lot of planning and not a lot of time to get it all done! We’ve had to send off applications to Erasmus+, apply and pay for visas, pack, arrange travel- home and to Beijing! And various other mountains of brain activity! The uni has been unbelievably helpful though. I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t for them.

But of course that has kept me pretty preoccupied as well this summer! So hopefully the amount of work I have done will be sufficient. I can catch up now I’ve finished work and I have plenty of motivation around me in this stunning city to get me started on my uni work again. So here goes! Time to get started on my next new adventure!

The images below display the few drawings and sketches I did this summer for the purposes of primary research and building up more drawing skills.

A Foxglove from the National Botanical Gardens. I wanted more of a challenge when it came to my drawing and I wanted to draw something a little more complex than I would usually choose. I thought that the shape and delicacy of this flower would be quite a difficult thing for me to capture in a drawing but I feel pleased with the outcome of this drawing.

As a house warming present, my Step- Dad bought me a Peace Lily to help decorate the house and make it a little more homely! I love Peace Lilies and I decided to do a drawing of this one. I was going to create my usual drawing with as much detail as I could include, but I quite liked it as more of a line drawing, with very basic lines to emphasise the lines and veins of the flowers and leaves but also to add very basic shading.

Another drawing from a plant at the National Botanical gardens. This is a trace of the drawing below, that I was going to develop with paints. My idea was to use various shades of green acrylic, and to paint lines of colour in the direction of the lines in the leaves. My intention here was that the acrylic would be quite thick and create bold and strong colours, and also to create some shading with the different greens. I ran out of time while I was at home to complete this but I plan to complete it when I return from my exchange in China.

This is the drawing that I decided to complete all with pencil. I am really pleased with how this has turned out because I think you can see the depth in the image from the shading, and I am also pleased with the lines within the leaves that branch off in various directions. I think that there are areas which need a lot of working in to to create some more depth and shadows where it is needed, but overall I am pleased with the outcome of this drawing.

The inspiration for this drawing (apart from my lovely… but slightly crackers cat) was my friend Kyah who is on the Textiles course with me and also shares my accommodation in Cardiff. One of her passions is drawing animals, in particular pets and she is absolutely incredible at it. She can create such amazing textures within her drawings, really creating the impression of various types of fur, and even create the idea of there being colour within an image even though the image is black and white. I have never been good at making an animal or a human look like what they actually look like within a drawing! So I don’t often dip my toe into this subject. However I wanted to branch away from my botanical drawings for a while and give it a go after seeing Kyah’s drawings, so I decided to take an image of my own cat, Niño. It took me a long time but I have finally completed this drawing. I am very pleased with it as I feel that it does look similar to my own cat…. admittedly I’ve made her appear a lot cuter than the beast she is in real life! But I am really pleased with it, and I feel that I have even created some impression of the texture within her fur which I am most pleased about. I think this is one of my most successful drawings that I have completed recently so I think that dipping my toe into this unfamiliar subject was well worth it for me!