Lost in China

For my last update before I go home for the break, the only thing I can think of writing about is the university and school system in China – since classes and exams have been all that has happened in my life lately. Sorry, no exotic pictures this time, but that should hopefully start again when I come back here in February.

Some of you may know that China is famous for having one of the toughest school systems in the world. In high school, students have little to no life outside school, at least during the week. From what Alice told me about her high school time, her day would start at 7am, and typically end around midnight. All that time would mainly be spent studying frantically, with only small breaks during the day (usually just enough to eat and shower.)

 High school students then need to pass the « gao kao », the final exam that will be their entry ticket to university. The better the grades, the better the universities they can apply for will be. According to one of my friends here, if someone fails the compulsory math exam, it will close them the door to most reputable universities and just leave them with the lower class options, that will most likely not be enough to land a good job. (Thankfully I’m not Chinese. ;))

In China, high school students are subject to intense pressure, mainly from their parents – whether they voice it or not – to succeed, go to university and get a decent job. Many parents will often sacrifice very much for their child’s, or sometimes children’s education, and their dreams of a better future, or a more comfortable life, lie in their offspring’s success. If their child obtains a well paid job, he or she will be able to care for his/her parents much more comfortably than if they were a street vendor.

 However the children are often in a similar same state of mind, and many are very grateful to their parents for their sacrifices, allowing them to go so far in their education and build a decent future. The sheer pressure is often outweighed by a sincere will to reach that place in life that will enable them to buy their parents a house, or give them a comfortable life once they retire.

However, with more and more families being now part of the booming Chinese middle-class, many children have led their life in a comfortable -sometimes spoiled- environment, with one or both parents already having a well paid job, and therefore they do not feel the same kind of pressure. Or at least, not for the same reasons.

The strict university selection seems to be the last major hurdle of their education, though. As soon as a student finally managed to enter a university, the pressure drops. Unlike in Europe or in the United States, Chinese university life is far from being as stressful as high school times.

From what my friends have told me, the hardest part is to get in – the rest is a piece of cake.
 My university ranks number 10 in the official Chinese university ranking, but so far I have not seen many pressure-burdened students working day and night to pass their exams. Actually, the exams themselves are far from being as bad as they could be – in one subject, the final exam was a 200 word essay.

So maybe it is just the laid back Southern spirit, but it definitely isn’t half as bad as I made it out to be.

The teacher– student relationship is also somewhat different from what I was used to in France, and closer to what I had in America. Dialogue is actually permitted, and as twisted as it may seem, if you ever attend class at a French university, you  will see that a casual relationship with a teacher is most of the time as improbable as me chatting it up with George Bush. Here, it isn’t rare to go out for lunch with a teacher, or have a casual chat after class. And sometimes, the much-stereotyped hysterical Chinese girl surfaces, and begs the professor to please pose for a picture with her, amid a cacophony of high pitched, over–enthusiastic squeaks.

My university is famed for being the « power point university », meaning that all the teaching, and a great deal of student work and exams are in the form of power point presentations. Everyone here is an expert in power point making techniques, so my attempts at creating a decent one have seemed rather poor next to my Chinese classmates. In the end however, I finally mastered the art of getting the text to pop up in numerous, exciting fashions. (This is when you clap.)

As for my English speaking class, it has taught me how to properly condut a well rounded speech, without the usual anxiety attacks and miraculously, without notes.
 
Next semester I’m in for 6 hours of Japanese a week, in Chinese please – extensive preparation of the manual is already on the way. The funny thing is that my borrowed Japanese dictionary is Japanese– Chinese, not Japanese– English.
So in order to understand the Japanese in the book, I first need to translate it into Chinese, assimilate it, and then retranslate it into English. And then the manual is obviously entirely written in Chinese and Japanese. Conclusion:  my desk resembles a paper war zone at the moment.

A few pictures that are totally irrelevant...;)

Emeline (my French roommate) and I gave this dog to my other roommate, Yunshu, for her birthday. She decided to wash it and after debating whether it was safe for machine-wash (we decided it wasn't), she was faced with the issue of how to dry it.  So I used my legendary cunningness (you are allowed to point and snigger) to find a solution, and that's what it looked like. It eventually hung for a few days along with the rest of the clothes, although the poor dog looked more like a clumsy paraglider.

A birthday tradition here is to paint the birthday "child"'s face with cake...What a waste, yes, yes. But to be honest, the cakes here are so gigantic that it is hard to have more than one serving - yes, even for me. Actually, what's even more common is to throw the whole cake in the person's face - but that would really be a waste. So we didn't do it.

On Christmas Eve, all of us French people went  to buy  hge amounts of food for our Christmas party. We decided it was the perfect occasion to wear santa hats,  and the whole procession was not without a certain  Snow white and the 7 dwarves feel to it.
And lucky for us, we even had our own living Christmas tree. :)


To finish this entry on an amusing anecdote, you will be delighted to know that my blog can be found by googling « therapeutic importance of camel meat ». (according to my blog statistics.)

I have an odd feeling the person who googled that didn’t find what they were looking for here, since my mention of camel meat was all but in depth. My apologies.

Hi everyone,

An update will very soon sprout in this very spot, as soon as I am done with all the presentations and various exams I am currently swamped with...

Many pictures and peculiar experiences to write about, so keep checking - I will have it posted by the end of this week!!

Now to keep you waiting, here are a couple of pictures from my recent trip to my friend Alice's hometown...
That little girl was cuteness incarnated. I will try to post a video of her, me and (the other) Alice, but it seems like Over-blog is being a real pain in the ass for uploading anything bigger than a picture. And it's already a painful process to upload pictures, which explains the scarceness of my updates.;)

Alice in front of her Granpa's house's entrance gate...It has a certain ancient China feel to it (if it wasn't a metal door ;))

More soon!!!

I did get quite a few comments urging me to update, and I apologize for lagging behind a little– the picture uploading process is quite tedious and that often deters me from updating…And I have had a busier life than a grasshopper on speed.

Yeah…that was a lousy comparison, but it is way too late right now to expect anything remotely better than that from me tonight.
So where was I? Oh yes, China. Like I wrote in my previous post, routine is settling in, and it is definitely settling in well. So much that nothing overly excitig has happened to me, other than finding myself in a restaurant along with two little chicks scuttling around the place and peeping away with all their chick-like might. (so not all that powerful, actually.)
A man was selling them on the street, he had roughly 30 chicks in a big cardboard box. All that had a definite « Oliver&Company » feel to it, when poor kitten Oliver is waiting for a generous soul to adopt him. The only difference being that those chicks will most likely be raised to end up as a Spring Festival meal, rather than lazily snoozing on their owner’s bed.
The proof in a picture:

I’ve also been learning a bit of Cantonese, and up to this point my vocabulary is surprisingly extensive. (In case you didn’t deduce it by yourself, that was meant to be sarcastic.)
My most useful sentence so far is « why don’t you understand what I’m saying? », which is certainly bound to get me very far. Same with « i can’t stand you anymore » and « banana ». Actually, you wouldn’t believe how useful « banana » has been. Shocking.

Some pictures of the campus...I went on the roof of our teaching building to get nice pictures of the sunset over the mountains, and it definitely was worth the effort ;)

Some fun facts now:
 – It is considered impolite to take a big chunk of food from a main dish and put it in your bowl, when it is possible to pick it directly from the main plate. Of course I did exactly that, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about it. And that only strenghtened my reputation of being a pig, since taking food like that means you are worried there won’t be enough left in the end to make you full.

– The campus supermarket sells the longest hygenic pads I have ever seen: 45 centimeters long, so basically the length of my forearm. But they fit the gigantic sizes of underwear I have occasionally seen in stores. And it makes me wonder who actually WEARS them, beause most Chinese girls would need to eat a whole cream cake factory to be able to fit them. But maybe they’re just there for decoration. Definitely not my taste, though.

– Everything here takes a little time. We needed a good two weeks to completely understand the functioning of the squat toilet flush, as we were constantly plagued by the irritating refusal of a little piece of toilet paper to go down with the rest. Not overly appetizing, is it?

 Following that trend, it took me approximately one month to realise I was facing the wrong side of the bathroom when using the toilet. Needless to say, that deeply aggravated me.
I still firmly believe my way was more convenient, but in order to fit in with my other fellow squat users, I had no choice but to adapt and change my ways…

And I shouldn’t even mention the month it took me to properly use our clothes hanging stick (the clothes lines are pretty high), which I stubbornly used in such an inconvenient way that clothes regularly showered back down on me. Until the day my roommate saved me, not without gratifying me with one of these « poor you, let me give you a pat » looks. And I will spare you my arduous journey to learn how to part the washing machine water pipe from the faucet…I was thoroughly splashed a couple of times. Like I said, everything here takes a little more time than it usually dœs. (At least for me.)

– The canteen we eat at every day is set on a lovely little lake. The lake also has a lot of fish. Nothing particularly shocking up until now, you’ll agree. We didn’t think so either, until one of us saw one of the cooks get the fish for our meals from the lake. Considering that the lake is very dirty, mainly because all the refuse coming from the canteen is dumped into it, the sweet and sour fish suddenly looks a lot less appealing…

– I tried camel meat on two occasions, and despite being a little too chewy, I must say it was very good…
At the camel meat restaurant , me, Alice and Bessie:

Now…
I went back to Guangzhou last week end, with Alice and her roommate Bessie. We basically just walked around the city, shopping and on my part, hunting down a Starbucks which I finally found, only to have my precious cappuccino spilled all over me by Bessie. The positive in all that being that I can now smell my bag, and be instantly transported into a heaven of Starbucks cappuccino.
I had my first hot pot, a traditional chinese meal, from the North if I am not mistaken. The pictures will be more explicit, but it is pretty much like a fondue without the cheese. A pot, boiling water, vegetables and meat, and chopsticks. And it is delicious, too.

Cutting out the cats designs for the factory...

Alice's mum seems to move a lot faster than us for she is always blurry on pictures...



I still haven’t grown to love Guangzhou. Too polluted, too crowded and just not very charismatic. However I find some areas very interesting, such as the small enclave in the city where Alice lives,.It offers a sheer diversity of surprising and typically Chinese  daily life scenes.







Rickshaws, small buses, bicycles, chariots, bearing a frightening amount of bundles or boxes, all struggle to make their way through the small streets, threatening to collide but always nimbly avoiding a crash.

 That is one thing the Chinese do very well –  often nearing collision but somehow (almost) always avoiding it. Chinese people are true experts in the art of swerving, zig-zagging, and honking (even more so than the French), and their mastery in avoiding a collision can be very entertaining, especially on campus.

Every day has its share of near–accidents, so I have come to the conclusion that it all must be a competition: who will get closest to the other without crashing. Every once in a while echœs a loud bang, and two poor students will lay on the ground, their bikes intertwined.

 Sometimes, we are lucky enough to witness one of them competing in solo, and one poor student instead of two, will be laying on the ground, underneath his bike. Managing to fall in such an acrobatic way, without any external help, is certainly a praiseworthy achievement.

That definitely makes for amusing sights for us French people, generally used to docile bike riders, who usually keep to a slow and uneventful pace. They rarely give us such an acrobatic crash show. It’s a pity.

I will finish this entry with some pictures…

Around the campus:
just for info, those two characters mean "beginning".

My two roommates...
The dorm...somewhat prison like ^^


The sky from the balcony...
More pictures from my time in Guangzhou... Alice and me...

That guy was having the hardest time getting into his costume, and when the girl who was helping him saw us , she got  pretty embarassed I think ;)

I realize it has been quite a while since I last posted here, I hope you haven't all deserted this blog and forgotten about it ;)

Lack of time to write here obviously means my life has been crazy, and with my trip to Guangzhou at the end of the holidays, and then classes starting the following Monday, I have found myself sitting and staring at this very page several times, but never going further than writing two words.

I went to Guangzhou, China's third biggest city (if I'm not mistaken), to visit a friend (Bernice) at the end of the vacation.

                                                                 Bernice! And when I came back to our sleepy and peaceful campus, I realized that I feel much better here! Guangzhou is a typical bustling Chinese city, but the pollution seems intensified by the heat and humidity. I had a very hard time standing the mix of pollution and noise and various (city) stenches.

I nevertheless had a really good time, Bernice took me around the city with two of her own friends, who had lived in Panama for several years. On the first day, we wandered to the mecca of cheap furniture (Ikea), a giant  bookstore and...Starbucks. Oddly enough, the only thing I managed to get from Ikea was a pair of slippers and some chocolate. And I spent the whole bookstore time experiencing yet another squat toilet, my stomach being still in the process of adapting to Chinese food...


The underground in Guangzhou is the epitome of modernity: instead of tickets you get little round plastic coins, that reminded me of those little plastic washing machine coins. Tthat doesn't sound too modern- but is is. The coins are then simply pressed on the electronic turnstile, and that's it. Mobile phone service is as good underground as above ground. After the months of roaming on the London tube, grumbling about the lack of service, it came as a surprise and was another example of how  incredibly contrasted China is.

The next day, Bernice and I walked to Shamian Island, which was a haven for foreigners at the time Guangzhou was invaded/colonized by the French and English. Today the island is a patch of peaceful greenery in the middle of  the city. Most buildings are of European architecture, and it seems to have become a very beloved spot for couples to get their wedding pictures done.Guangzhou even has a gothic looking church..Which I didn't see.



The most peacefully situated Starbucks I have ever drunk a coffee in...


On our way to Shamian, we walked through a typical Chinese market. I had most pleasurable encounters with jumpings toads (in a basket), chicken testicles and more or less (usually less) appealing ingredients. Like my Chinese friends often tell me- Cantonese people eat anything.
                                                                      The toads...

                                                         and the testicles...

I also experienced my first counterfeit DVD store. After a stealthy hand gesture and a mysterious sounding "we'd like to go upstairs", we meandered through a rather squalid-looking building, passed several locked doors until we finally arrived to the (very well hidden) dvd heaven. 5 movies and a whole season of Heroes made the 10 € I spent well worth it.

In the evening, Bernice taught me how to make Chinese dumplings. My dumplings had a rather pitiful appearance next to Bernice's, but in the end they all tasted the same anyway. Other pictures from Guangzhou:

      Bernice took me to a restaurant in the morning (not my usual habit ;)) to try the famous Cantonese Dim Sum, a variety of food presented in small wicker baskets : meat balls, fried rice in a leaf, chicken,pork, dumplings...and of course, tea.. Families often come on Sunday mornings to drink tea, chat and eat to their heart's content.
The tray with all the wicker baskets:

and what we ordered:

One of Guangzhou's biggest shopping avenues has a group of statues scattered along the street, and subject to varied uses:

A chopstick store, mainly for tourists from what Bernice told me...

The posh looking restaurant where we ate the Dim Sum was so popular people were queueing for what seemed a very long time...

The backstreets of the poorer areas of Guangzhou...


At the entrance of the market, the hustle and bustle of a typically Chinese market is starting to make itself noticed...




The next day, we went back to Zhuhai to go to the Chinese Medicine valley. After the noise and smog of Guangzhou, it was the perfect place to be. Hot springs(and colder ones) filled with all kinds of Chinese medicine made for a very relaxing day.

And then back to the reality of university life, with the semester beginning for us, at last.

Now that I finally caught up on the crazy first days, I'll be a little more detailed  about my life here on this utterly remote campus.

Like I said in my previous post, we are the only foreigners on the campus. Well technically, there are a few foreign teachers, but when it comes to students, there's only us. It turns us into a living form of public entertainment, and it isn't all that rare to have a Chinese student come up to you and ask for a picture, and even less uncommon to be waved at, greeted or just pointed at. Ma Jin told us there were about 10 000 students on the campus, but given that it is the size of a small town, it is more similar to a sleepy village most of the time. Most students will spend their days at the library when classes start, right now it seems like the main activity for many students (including my roommates) is to while away time in front of the computer, watching movies or chatting online. They actually are worse than me...


The advantage of living on such a huge campus is that it really is like a city, and we could definitely live in complete autarcy if we wanted to (but we don't.). There are two or three supermarkets, a building full of useful (and less useful) stores such as a computer/hardware store, a hairdresser, bookstore, fruit market, an accessories store and more I haven't seen yet. We can eat at three different canteens offering all sorts of food from the various Chinese provinces, and because we eat quite late we miss the masses of students rushing to the canteens aroun 11 am or 5.30 pm. The supermarkets have pretty much anything a student here could ask for: all kinds of food obviously, but also matresses, tins, cups, lamps, fans, pens, clothes pins, detergent, and so on.  We get biscuits, bottles of water or juice, or even yoghurt or ice cream in all flavours and sizes, many being the Chinese version of famous brands such as Tropicana, Oreo or Danone.


What amuses me is that everybody basically buys exactly the same products. And everything is very childish, and most accessories are adorned with cartoon character designs. For example, when I bought my tupperware dish I had to choose between a cute Hello Kitty or two bouncy frogs. Same with the mattress and pillows, spoons, mirror, umbrellas...And talking about umbrellas, they seem to be a very popular trend here. I still haven't figured out if girls use it to avoid tanning, to block the heat or as a sun shade...maybe all three. But it certainly is an odd sight to see dozens of girls walking around with umbrellas over their heads on a bright sunny day. I'm telling you, new trends starts here...

Students can also buy their washing machines, mobile phones or bikes on campus, and can be driven around in those little buses I previously mentioned.

The campus is incredibly calm and peaceful, with lush mountains on one side and the South China Sea on the other. It takes from 45 minutes to an hour to walk from one end of the campus to the other, but the surroundings are so lovely it really isn't a big deal. Little ponds and lakes are scattered all across campus, with benches on their banks which make for nice romantic nights. As for me, I would love to explore the little mountains around it, but I was told they were full of snakes and hard to get to...

it takes about an hour by bus to get to Zhuhai, but that hour can sometimes seem like 3, because the buses are very Chinese- almost always painfully crowded. If you're lucky you'll get an AC bus, if you're not, well...The hardest part is to get out, so we always try to stay by the doors...but the downside is that we get the flow of passengers getting on or off full in the face. The other day an old man fell asleep on my shoulder. And all the other times, I didn't get a seat. ;) I haven't seen much of Zhuhai yet, except for the medical clinic and Mc Donalds...we also saw the border to Macau, which in fact is a giant mall right underneath the border control post.

Now the dorm. We were put in a typical Chinese 4 bed-dorm room. They put the 11 of us French students together in pairs, with boys and girls having their own dorm and very strict rules to abide by regarding visiting the opposite sex in their dorm...

I was placed with Emeline, whose parents are Chinese/Cantonese, and two chinese girls named Olive and Gwen(they only told me their English names. I was surprised at how often the students insist on you us calling them by their "Western" name, maybe because they think their Chinese names are too hard to remember for us (which is sometimes true when you meet so many people at the same time).

The room is very...basic. You can see for yourselves on the pictures, it is going to be a very interesting year. We already had thorough debates about the technical issues related to the squat toilet, and were also introduced to the joys of handwashing laundry. But all in all, I had expected worse - the one thing I  will obviously miss the most is my privacy, but this is just for a year and my roommates seem to be of the quiet type. I am all settled in with my kettle, dehydrated noodles, coffee, biscuits and hopefully soon an electric plate to cook small meals if I'm too tired of the canteen.

                                                               My view from the balcony....

                                                          The dorm just opposite us, with everyone hanging their laundry on the balcony.
                                                           The glorious toilet/shower...
                                                                 And the sink...my Chinese roommates always close the bathroom door so  there is a constant stench of condensed heat  and...it just smells bad.
                                                                  The  room...with our beautiful dorm phone...
                                            ...and my little corner of  the  woods.                                        What it looks like when Alice handwashes her laundry...

                               And my humble...uhm...kitchen accessories ;) Please note the pink tupperware, and you haven't even seen the design on the lid. And the mug is Mickey mouse. The only non-flashy thing are the chopsticks...

The heat seems to have slackened a bit lately, and I have heard a typhoon is on its way...it definitely is a breath of fresh air, literally. When we first arrived, we were sweating faster than we could drink to make up for what we sweated out , and living on the 6th floor didn't make matters easier. The weather should only start getting colder around early November, so we should face another rough month...the worst time of year starts in May though, with the beginning of the monsoon. I bought a mini fan for my bed, but I rarely seem to use it...and when I wake up I am literally dripping with sweat. Ugh.

As for the classes, they start on Monday and we still haven't solved our schedule problems. As of now, we have a few Chinese classes, Kung Fu, Calligraphy and a few English and International Trade classes. And Japanese for me, and that is the problem. Cross your fingers for me please...

Tomorrow I am off to Guangzhou to visit my friend Bernice, who kindly invited me to stay with her and her parents. For now the plan is to go to Ikea and a couple of bookstores, and maybe I will try and get some of the sights in...On Saturday we are heading back to Zhuhai to go to the Chinese Medicine Valley, a sort of Spa resort with hot springs, therapeutic meals and massages.

That's it for now...