Week 1: Before Classes Start

It turned out that classes were to start on September 10, so I basically had Wednesday through Sunday to settle in before thinking much about school. The first day, my roommate took me around to get something to eat, and shop for things I would need in the room. Her school has an exchange set up with Lanzhou University – each year five Yeungnam University students go to Lanzhou and five Lanzhou University students go to Yeungnam. So, she came with four other Korean students from her school, and they’d all been here a week or so already. I really can’t overestimate how helpful that was – actually, how helpful in general it has been to ask people who have already gone through the first days here how to do it. I like to figure things out by myself – read the manual, look at the company or school’s webpage, etc. But here, that’s not so easy, sometimes because things aren’t written down or accessible, often because my Chinese reading skills are currently rather slow and limited. It takes a long time to look things up in the dictionary.

Another thing that made things easy is that there’s a large wal-mart-esque store across the street from the university. This actually makes some things easier than in England, where there were no such stores within walking distance. I indeed breathed a sigh of relief when I walked in and knew that every essential item was in a few minutes walk. Plus, I really enjoy shopping in such stores in different countries, seeing the similar but different products catered to a culture’s taste and taste buds. For example, in Vanguard, this Chinese Wal-mart, there was a large section dedicated to moon cakes gearing up for Mid-Autumn festival, huge bins of rice, and a large the selection of rice cookers and cups for drinking tea. The store also has an amazing cool feature that I hope appears in other stores – there are free lockers to put your things in while you shop. You push a button, and a little white slip pops out. When you take the slip, a locker pops open and you can put your things inside while you shop. When you want your things back, you just scan your slip on the same machine and your locker pops open. A really good idea, and I was surprised to see it first in Lanzhou.

I guess before I left, I didn’t really think of Lanzhou as a whole, complex city. It was just this foreign, far, unheard of place I got randomly bumped into to spend a period of time. But it’s a city as any other – there are parks, there are shops, there are restaurants. People go to museums and they go to concerts and they go shopping. They go out to eat. But they also do strange dances in public squares in early morning hours and sell lots of food and small items on the street. Some places are dirty and not taken care of; people don’t follow the traffic laws and they spit and stare.

This is the main gate to Lanzhou University. The guys are my neighbors, and the girl is Yuri, my roommate.

This is along the path from the main gate to the place I'm living.

Similarly, Lanzhou University is like other universities I’ve known. It’s clearly a campus - there’s a library and a gym, dormitories and classrooms (though I often can’t tell what is what). There are students walking around all the time, there are places to eat and little stores selling student necessities. There’s a bank branch, and a China Telecom branch. There are even construction sites. But then again, it’s extremely different. There are a ton of outdoor ping pong tables and badminton courts, and no grassy fields. Instead of a ‘green,’ there’s a big very Asian-feeling park, with a curvy pond and stone benches. The buildings are mostly old and not very attractive. At certain times of the day, everyone walks around with big hanging canteen-jug things, filling them with hot water to drink (even the Chinese don’t drink straight tap water). There is a place where the newspaper gets posted ever day and anyone can walk up and read it.This is where newspaper gets poted, and several people have stopped to read it.

I’m living in the “International Guest House,” or 专家楼, which is at the back of the main part of the university campus. (see photo below). My room is pretty basic, with two beds, two desks, two armoires, and a TV. We’ve also got a little entryway with a bathroom off of it. There’s a normal shower and toilet (which is not the case in Chinese student dorms I hear). We only have hot water between 6-9am and 6pm-midnight, meaning that I have to get up before 9 to have a hot shower (something I did not know on my first morning here...). Also, this is actually the first time I have ever had a TV in my room. We get 50-60 channels, but naturally they are all in Chinese. For now, I watch the occasional sports match and sometimes turn it on for ambiance and osmosis. We tried watching kids’ shows but even they were tough to follow. One good thing is that most of the channels have Chinese subtitles running across the bottom. Once my Chinese gets a little better, I think it will be a really good learning device.

So in case you’re wondering – I’m basically speaking Chinese all the time. Sometimes I get frustrated because I can only express simple ideas, or I try to say something a little complicated and completely fail. I miss being able to joke, too, and have to settle for a very situational-based type of humour. But I have been pleased so far by how easily my conversational Chinese comes to mind. I don’t know how correct it is, but that’s a nice thing about talking with other foreigners – they don’t know either and if they do, don’t mind. My roommate and neighbours are often conversing in Korean, but they have agreed to stop doing so in my presence after one month, and I plan to hold them to it (Oct. 6!).

Another very important topic – food! The food is really good and really cheap. We’re still figuring out where are the best places to eat, but have one favourite restaurant just outside the campus, where a full meal comes out to $1 or so (50p!), and you can easily get full elsewhere on half that. I’ve made progress in deciphering a Chinese menu, which is no small feat. I am developing my repertoire of foods that I can identify on the menu, and a vocabulary of key food terms (e.g., 炒 is fried, 丝 means cut into thin strips, 血means blood so stay away, etc.). In the morning, sometimes I just eat a piece of fruit in my room, sometimes go out to eat beef noodles in soup (牛肉面), which are hand-pulled and renowned in Lanzhou (I hope to post a video of this sometime – its pretty cool to see them made) or steamed dumplings (包子). I still don’t really like eating what seems to me like lunch food for breakfast, but maybe I’ll get used to it yet.

Yuri at what's for now our favorite restaurant.

Also, it’s most fun to eat with a number of other people here. Mealtime is very different – there are almost always many dishes served and everyone eats from each. You have a small bowl of rice, but you don’t serve yourself helpings, you just take bite by bite (with your chopsticks!) from the general serving dishes. If your group is larger than four, the table generally has a lazy-susan which gets turned periodically throughout the meal. Also, out at a restaurant, the servers put down one menu and then one person orders all the dishes. At a lot of the inexpensive restaurants, you write down your own order on a piece of paper they give you. If someone invites you out to go eat, they will do the ordering. They might ask what you like to eat, but they are in charge of choosing a good, varied selection of food. I am already yearning a bit for certain foods (someone mentioned alfredo the other day and I just about melted. It’s funny how I hardly ever eat this in the US, but when it’s not around I still miss it). As for western food, I hear there is a place serving pizza in town, and there are several KFCs. I’ll put it off for a while, and then go. No McDonald’s, though.

This is a street not far from the University. I'm on a pedestrian bridge crossing the street.

Lanzhou is a strangely built city – long and skinny, stretching for about 30km along the Yellow River, mostly on the south bank. I bought a map, and it’s funny how it keeps folding out and out and out. I guess that’s pretty convenient, actually, for the printing press. There are mountains on both sides of the river which have prevented the city from growing much in a second dimension. This is also part of what has given Lanzhou a name for being quite polluted, even for China. The mountains prevent air circulation and the pollution produced stays in the area. The other part is the quick industrial and population growth of the city (it now has a population of over 3 million). However, I haven’t found the pollution (or the population for that matter) to be unbearable. Often the mountains sort of look like they’re behind an opaque screen, and you know they’d look a lot prettier if you could see them clearly. And maybe the airs a bit dirty and smells funny, but I’ve gotten used to it. I hear winter is the worst. For now though, it’s better than I had feared, and I’ll leave that worry on the shelf for a while.

Another street view from near the University, with the mountains in the background.

The University is on the East end of Lanzhou, and the shape of the city makes distances kind of long. Still, I can get to the Yellow River in about 30-40 minutes, and to most parts of the town centre in an hour or less. There are several parts to the campus, and I’m still figuring them out.

During the time before classes started, I also had to take care of some official business in order to be registered at the university and stay in the country legally. By far, the most exciting step was the medical exam, followed at some distance by getting a bank account. Everyone had to do the medical exam, regardless of what doctors’ in their home country had said about their state of health. Early my second morning, Yuri took me onto bus number 33, which we rode out east to the last stop. Tucked away behind and through several buildings was a door marked with something about “international entry and exit inspection and quarantine”. After filling out some forms, they ordered me to the 2^nd floor to get my blood drawn. After that, I got shuffled around from floor to floor, room to room, and doctor to nurse, each pointing me where to go next in a well-oiled but very strange sequence of events. The drawing blood might have been the scariest – I waited in a line where each person in turn, once at the front, put his/her arm through a window where a nurse tied a rubber tube around the upper arm and drew blood into a few small tubes, everyone watching. During this same step they also asked for a urine sample (at least you got to do that privately). I went for a chest X-ray, an ultrasound, did an eye test (though of course there’s no alphabet, so I was just pointing which direction an “E” was facing. I was following around two British guys starting a gap year teaching English in a more remote part of the province and one of them comment that because of this his vision was much better in China than in England). They poked and prodded, took an ECG. Finally, it was over, and I was told to come back next week to get the results. It all cost about $35, and I found out I’m blood type O. My Korean friends were all surprised that I hadn’t known my blood type before – to them it’s kind of important, and they even have theories about what the personalities of people with certain blood types tend to be. Anyway, I eventually went back to get my results and have since delivered them to the security bureau of Lanzhou, along with paperwork from the school and my passport, as an application for a residence permit.

I now have two bank accounts in China, both with about $2 in them (I first opened at the wrong bank for the school to deposit my stipend money). At the second, China Industrial and Commercial Bank, I had to fill out the application form three times. After the first time, I thought maybe I just had to fill out the form in duplicate so I wrote exactly the same thing again. After the second time, the bank worker frustratedly showed me that when I marked which type of account I wanted, I had put an ‘x’ in the box. In China, this means you don’t want the item – you have to put a check in the box to indicate your selection. Third time I got it right.

The first weekend I went with a group of people (including some Chinese students) to a mountainside park just outside of town. We ended up waiting around a long time for everyone to arrive so didn't make it very far up the mountain. Still, it was very interesting to see the city from a bit of a distance, and to see the activities of Chinese people out in the park on a Sunday morning. There were lots of people doing Tai Chi or group dance-like exercises (Chinese line dancing! - see video at bottom). There were people playing badminton, and lots of old men doing whatever you call it in this picture: