Alex in China

I realized today that I haven’t really written anything explaining our living situation in Qingdao or our daily life. It’s true, we actually have a “daily” life in between excursions and traveling- well, kind of.

We live in the international dorms at Ocean University which are considered luxurious compared to the Chinese dorms but don’t compare at all to dorms in America. I don’t mind though, I think I’d feel like I was losing out on the experience if I was staying in a 5-star hotel. The rooms are nicely furnished and extremely small (some would said “cozy”?) and the beds aren’t exactly what you’d call soft (yet I still fall asleep the minute I lay down). Our AC is amazing and our room has quickly gained a reputation as the Arctic zone. The bathroom is an interesting situation, it’s about 8×3 and it’s just a sink, shower head, and toilet lined up with a drain in the middle of the bathroom. But all in all, we have it really good compared to most living situations in China so I’ll take it! Also we’ve got this cool old lady who lives at the bottom of our building who speaks no english but loves to say “ni hao” to us as we go in and out.

Every day we have Chinese Mandarin from 8am till noon so we all meet go as a group and get our morning dumplings before heading to class. Four hours is a long time to study a language everyday but we get small breaks so it’s usually handleable. After class we all head out for lunch on the town at whatever restaurant seems good. We’ve all gotten into this weird habit of eating ice cream after every meal because it’s so cheap and it’s every 20 feet.

After lunch it’s back to the university for Intercultural Communication with Professor Lapastina. Most of us actually call him Tio which is Portuguese for uncle. It’s a very casual professor-student relationship. Which is awesome because we don’t have that usual professor barrier with him. It makes the learning environment much less intimidating. Tio is part brazilian, part Italian and is fluent in Portuguese, Spanish and Italian (not to mention, he’s picked up some Chinese since he’s been here). The class itself is extremely interesting and like no class I’ve taken before (which is probably due to the fact that I’m a business major).

And then for the rest of the day/night we have freedom! We can head downtown and walk around the city or go to a local restaurant or even head over to the beach (if you feel like freezing to death). Tonight I think we’re all heading over to the night market to do some shopping.

So enough about “life”…I’ve got good news (or at least it’s good news for me). For our second communications course we’re supposed to be doing an independent research which means we pick a topic that interests us and research it extensively in China and then produce a large paper on it. I was having trouble thinking of something that interested me enough to where I’d actually enjoy spending hours upon hours working on it. So I thought to myself “Self, what do you already spend lots of time doing?” and then it hit me, this blog. So I presented the idea to Tio (Professor Antonio) and asked for his advice on how I could turn this passion into something presentable. We talked today and came up with something that really seems amazing. From now on I’ll be doing bi-weekly posts that are focused on independent subjects of Chinese culture and analyzing them through my own experiences. It’s kind of hard to explain, and it’s not exactly set in stone how I need to go about doing this, but I’m looking forward to the challenge. The first week will be more casual as I get in the groove before we leave for Beijing. After we get back I’ll be getting more in depth with the subjects, comparing them to articles or research and really diving into it.

So in summary, there’s going to be an increase in posts from now on. Some will be my cultural writings and some will be just about daily life. Hopefully both will be equally exciting, that’s what I’m aiming for -a