5-funf

Why is this post on saturday doing on a tuesday night?
I owe alot of things, so I'm striking them off one by one

12/3/11

First Saturday spent in Tianjin city. We boarded the bus together, much to the horror of the bus driver, who noticed that there were so many foreigners squeezing themselves up the bus, many of them speaking mandarin with a strange accent and mispronunciations aplenty. 

Taking the bus in Tianjin is very much like in Singapore. There are numerous bus lines, and fares, just that all the signs are in Chinese and I don’t know any of the places the bus drives to. Fortunately, we stay in the city suburbs, and getting around the city will not be a problem, given the many different bus routes that pass through the area.

Our 1^st stop today was the city’s food street. We got off from the bus stop and walked through the city streets to the food street. As we walked through the streets together, curiously there were no people looking at us, unlike in other places, we would have drawn stares all around. I believe the people here are used to seeing foreign students coming to Tianjin to study; some have taken the liberty to guess where we were from. Along the way, the bus passed by a few universities within 30 minutes, showing the number of universities set up in the area.

Tianjin is starting to look like Boston to me. Boston is an American university town, with many of the prestigious Ivy League schools located in the vicinity, whereas Tianjin is a Chinese city with many education avenues and high end research facilities as well, making it a university town with history. I guess there’s where the appeal of studying in Tianjin is. The visitor attractions mostly have something to do with history and culture, which promotes an overall culture for learning, which is beneficial to anybody, even if they’re not caught up with studying. 

So we walked through the food street, sampling the wide variety of food available, eating the popular food along the way. 

Next we walked through the relatively quiet city centre to get to the old street. Some of us had self portraits done by an artist who charged 10 RMB for each one. Not only that, he was pretty fast too!

I’m coming back one day to these places. They are really, really beautiful

*Gasp* it's rubbish