It’s only been a week?!?

Crazy. I was thinking about my last days here in China and even though I’ve only been here for six days, it feels like much longer. So many impressions, so many people, so many new things. I realized that my last entry was held very general, so I thought that today I’d give you a couple more specifics about my daily life and living situation.

For the first days after I arrived I stayed in a hotel on the university campus. Since my room was right next to what appeared to be a place to do gymnastics I was usually woken up by Chinese marching music in the morning. But already on Friday morning I went apartment hunting with Karin, a Chinese German language student. We already left at 9:30 am to go to the first real estate agency. After filling out a couple of forms, they checked their computer and showed me a couple of rooms in the area. The ones we thought were okay, we had a look at. In total we went to four different agencies and looked at about eight rooms. Lots of negotiating, asking questions and inspecting of the rooms. I was very happy I had Karin. I’m not sure how people find an apartment without a Chinese translator. Anyway, apparently I was very lucky because I found a good room in an apartment with a Russian girl as my flat mate, which is quite cheap and really close to my work place (only 15 minutes on foot and most of is walking on the beautiful Campus).

So, right away on Saturday it was moving time again. I went to look for a taxi with the language assistant of my department him and me fully packed with my luggage (a huge suitcase, two big backpacks and thousands of little bags). Unfortunately none of us knew Chinese, but we were determined to communicate to the driver anyway where we wanted to go. We were able to find a taxi quite quickly, so after trying to tell the driver for five minutes where I wanted to go (it was really not a hard route, just straight and then the next big street to the right), I gave up and called Karin to translate for me. This worked out immediately.

On Sunday then I met up with a two of the volunteers that I got to know at the preparation seminar in Germany the week before I left and who I knew are working in Guangzhou as well. We spent the whole day, walking and talking, taking the metro around Guangzhou, eating Jiaozi (Chinese dumplings) and just being  tourists.  It was a lot of fun and I got to see a little more of the city. I won’t go into detail, but you can just have a look at the pictures.

On Monday I spent the whole afternoon at the police station and the real estate agency. In China every foreigner has to register right away where he is staying. This is why  I went to the police station. For some reason I was expecting a huge and modern building at a big street with lots of policemen. But I was very surprised to see that the opposite was the case. Since none of us really knew where the police station was, we had to look for quite a while until we found out in which direction to go. Contrary to what I expected the police station was not situated at a big street, but in a living area about five minutes walk away from the big street. To get there you had to go through a maze of small streets. Further, the police station itself was only one room with two secretaries. Not at all what I was expecting. A couple of forms (you can see the Chinese love forms! They have them for everything! No matter what you want to do, exchange money,  look for a room, you have to fill out at least one or two  forms) and about 20 minutes later I was registered.

Well, I could go on and on about everything that happened and what I did, but I think this is enough at first.

Maybe some more things I noticed: Firstly, everywhere in China there seems to be German classical music. If you call someone it automatically plays “Für Elise”, in the restaurants I often heard “Freude schöner Götterfunken” or German ringtones. I was very surprised. Secondly, Chinese English can be quite funny. Regardless, if it is instructions in the metro or on advertisements  on billboards. Especially, shirts with English sayings on it are very popular. Unfortunately, the people that wear those shirts don’t always seem to know what it says on their shirt.

Franzi