Back on track...

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 ;)