Yesterday was the first day of classes, meaning that I am officially done with orientation. Orientation is always a funny thing – it is both wonderful, in that you don’t have any actual homework and get to do fun things, and horrible, since you have no idea who anyone is or where to find anything.

This wasn’t completely true for me, since there are four other Northwestern students here at IES with me. That made some things a lot easier, but still. Beijing is a little tricky to navigate, and some of the mandatory orientation lectures get old regardless of what program they are for.

However, orientation also had some insanely awesome things for us to do. At Northwestern we mostly just had our little Essential NU programs where we would be told not to binge drink, have sex safely, be aware of diversity, and something else that I have long since forgotten.

Here at IES we had Mystery Beijing and Mystery Haidian, and I am proud to say that my partner for Mystery Beijing and I successfully finished our task, and even prouder to say that my group for Mystery Haidian owned the competition.

Mysteries Beijing and Haidian are the scavenger hunt activities that the IES staff puts on for its students during the last two days of orientation. The first round is Mystery Beijing, where you and a partner are given five hours to find a place in Beijing that they give to you in Chinese, whereas Mystery Haidian involves a larger group, four hours, and a list of many things with various points all around the Haidian district, where Beijing Foreign Studies University is.

The whole point of the activity was that you had to ask Chinese people for directions and had to use public transportation at least once.

Being forced to go to places such as the Yonghegong Lama Temple in Beijing, roughly an hour away once we figured out where a subway stop was, and into random locations such as a Chinese traditional medicine clinic and a massage parlor in Haidian helped me and the rest of my group members get over our fear of using our broken Chinese with the people in Beijing. Once you get over the first person staring at you because you said, “oops, I forgot my cat,” instead of “oops, I forgot my hat,” makes the next person’s stares not seem quite as bad.

Plus, since my group totally beasted the Mystery Haidian competition, we are getting a free fancy dinner out of it, which makes the hour we spent getting Peking duck and a demonstration of how to eat it totally worth it.