I'm italian living and studying in Beijing since 4 months now, the life here
is quite cheap except for the apartment rent if you want a good location
with western standard details (expecially bathroom). Prices for 1 bedroom
room vary from 2000 to 4000 yuan/month but it's quite difficult to get a
agreement for a stay of less than 6 months, good alternative is to be a
roommate of someone that have a apartment already
the BLCU university is in the north/west area of beijing and if you plan to
stay here around, you should check for a temporary accomodation close to the
campus area, I suggest the Xi Jiao hotel
(http://www.xijiao-hotel.com.cn/english/bgjj/) that also offer long term
stay rates for students
please don't stay in Tian An Men/Forbidden city area, from there to reach
the school you need to travel about 50 minutes changing 3 subway lines
by the way, except the name, there are better (and much cheaper)
alternatives to study other than BLCU. Anyway in four months I can just
speak a very basic chinese but I can do by myself most of the ordinary
things, it wasn't the same in beginning, I needed help all the time
regards
Diego
"jpc" wrote in message
news:ccd7c0af.0401061243.7be0eb14@posting.google.com...
> Hello,
> I'm going to Beijing at the end of the month to study at the Beijing
> language and Culture University. I have a couple of questions I think
> some of you may have answers to, but first an outline of my goals:
> 1) Learn as much spoken / written mandarin chinese as I can (enough so
> I can speak without any hiccups in most daily conversations & enough
> so i can use a computer in chinese)
> 2) do some traveling on weekends / between semesters
>
> the plan:
> I'm going to be there about 2 weeks before the semester starts and my
> housing is still up in the air. It sounds like it is
> first-come-first-serve at the dorms. The dorm rates are attractively
> cheap at around $180/month for a shared room /bath in hallway, but I
> don't know if it would be better to stay there or try and rent my own
> apartment (250/month for a 2br?)
>
> I'll start by staying in one of the youth hostels around. I'm
> thinking about FeiYing near the forbidden city.
>
> If anyone has been to this university / linguistics school before, I'd
> love to hear your experience.
>
> I'm also going to be landing at 9pm and I only have 2 semesters of
> elementary chinese (traditional too), so I only know a few expressions
> and my comprehension is relatively poor (darn) at this point.
>
> Tips, experiences, etc? Thanks for all your help and feedback!
> -jpc
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