this time you won't see any pictures either, it's just too much effort. but Im typing, that's at least something!

I believe I will miss China more than I would have expected.
first of all I gonna miss the hot water, that is offered everywhere, I have never been drinking so much tea in my whole life!
secondly, I will miss the prices. you can go to a small restaurant, eat and drink so much, so that you feel like exploding, and you pay 7 euro. for 4 persons. yes. not 7 euro per person but 4 ppl can be full with just 7 euros. today I bought the awesomenestestest winter jacket ever, I was told its a real Esprit jacket, which I can hardly believe, since I was in a small market and well the market is in china, so its supposed to be fake. however, the quality of the jacket is like a real esprit jacket, so it might be true? who knows. anyways I paid less than 50 euros for this jacket, in austria it would be at least 4 times more expensive.
last but not least, I will miss the chinese "whatever works" attitude. they dont care if its messy, they dont care if there are a lot of ppl, they just dont give a damn. they do care a lot about their traditions, everything else though is not as important. their attitude helped me a lot to "calm down".

Hmm I just realized, writing in english sucks. I cant think in english anymore, my english pronunciation is crap... I talk more german in Beijing than in Vienna! stupid program... being with austrians in the chinese courses at least 3 hours per day + living with german speaking ppl is rly not such a great idea.

a few days ago, I was riding my bike to get to uni. I had to stop at the crossroads, so I was waiting. I saw a taxi in the first row, waiting too cuz his traffic lights were red. behind him there was a normal car, haunking aaall the time.
after a while, the car driver got out of his car, pulled the taxi driver out of his taxi and started screaming at him. he was pissed of that he couldnt drive. they started to push each other, after a few seconds they used their fists to hit each other, sometimes straight into the face!  it took a while until the woman in the car got out too, she kinda tried to stop them, she obviously failed. it was horrible to see this, I wish I could have stopped them  but 1. Im a woman 2. im a foreigner, I dont even know how to say, stop fighting! the cars that continued driving straight, passed the two men at high speed, so if one would have stepped back, he would have been driven over ...
it was interesting and shocking at the same time to watch the other chinese next to me. because they just starred. some even didnt act like they were waiting for the traffic light to turn green. it seemed they are at the crossroads just to see the fight.
this small incident reminded me of an accident that happened in Guangdong, southern China. my story is not as severe, but it could have nearly been. a young girl was walking on the street, when it was hit by a car. it was run over by another car. 18 ppl have seen this but not a single person tried to help the girl. If you havent heard about it, just read this article: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8840381/Chinese-girl-run-over-by-a-car-dies.html

bike story:
you come to china. you need a bike. so you buy a new bike, for not even 30 euros. you are happy.
after 3 weeks you are not happy anymore. the tires always run out of air. it feels like you have to ride the bike on a mountain road. after refilling the tires, you feel like flying.
but after 2 weeks you are not happy anymore. the handlebars are moving, when you turn left, the handlebars are straight - that sucks. you get it repaired, you are happy again.
but no! after another 2 weeks the chain always jumps off. riding your bike for 10 min means you have to repair your bike at least twice. so you are not happy. not at all. you have to go to the subway station. cuz you are late, you take the bike for the short distance. after 1 min the chain jumps off again. you have a closer look. oh it didnt jump off! it completely tore apart. so guess what. you are not happy. you get your bike repaired (for 2 euros). then you are happy.
it is pretty predictable already, anyways: BUT NO, after 2 weeks your left pedal has a problem. you have no idea what it is. but it gets worse and worse. when you can only use your right leg to ride your bike, since the left pedal is completely broken, you decide to get it repaired. goodbye another 20 yuan! Now you are happy again.
Let's see how long my happiness lasts.

my chinese courses got so boring . every day its the same, new vocabulary, new sentences, new short, boring dialogues. I have already prepaired all of my presentations, so I have no excuse for not studying vocabulary. but I dont wanna. oh well I have one excuse. I have to write an essay (3 pages) about the analects of confucius. its in traditional chinese, so i cant read it. another tiny problem is, that its not modern chinese. the analects were written about 2000 years ago. two thousand years. thats quite a while. chinese had enough time to change. have you ever read a text in your language that is 2000 years old? no? because european languages are not even that old (at least when you refer to the written form). so you can imagine how weird this version of chinese must be.
so basically, I have the choice between writing an essay, of which i dont understand the topic, and studying new vocabulary. I  have no idea how to say this in english: die Wahl der Qual.
(" the choice of torture" the normal version of the saying is: Die Qual der Wahl, the torture of choosing. you say that phrase, when something is rly hard to choose. however, you can change the order, when you have to choose one out of two "tortures")

every sunday I go to an open-mic-night, its pretty awesome. ppl can just go on stage and perform. there are some ppl that perform every sunday, however, sometimes there are new musicians too. when I have heard of this happening, I thought that it must be pretty terrible - every one can go on stage and perform?! ... but those ppl are real professionals! it makes so much fun to listen to them, even though they often play the same songs, so that I plan on going there every sunday:)

I did indeed type a lot this time. I hope you are all fine and enjoy life, no matter where you are on this planet! see you in like 3 months in Vienna (in case you are there)! I love you and miss you! 下下下个月见（要是你在维也纳) !  我爱你们，我很想你们！

oh wow, long time no blog post, right? time is running and I don't even notice. China seems to have soaked me up in it's timeless space. week after week everything is the same, though I start liking to be here. I finally found a way out of my black hole in that I was stuck since i got here. so my situation has improved a lot. I kind of start to speak chinese now, I know every sentence that I say is wrong, I know the tones are not correct and the order of the words is just horrible but I speak. thats the first step! I guess my german-speaking language partner helps me a lot, it's fun to hang out with her, so learning chinese makes fun.

the courses are ok too - except for one. I actually liked that course most, it is called "reading newspaper" and we basically just critisize the government all the time. but unfortunately our chinese is not so good yet, so we cant discuss difficult topics. however, our teacher forces us to do taht. so she just gives us perfect chinese sentences that we should learn by heart. in the exam we can use the sentences to critisize the government. any other sentences are ok too, as long as they have the same meaning. so if we express our own meaning, which is not the teacher's, we are fucked and we fail the exam. our teacher is the chinese government of our class room, so to say. isn't that awesome? gosh I rly hate her for that.

next week, so on thursday, I have my presentation in that course, I gonna talk about aids in china. thats gonna be fun. it took me 6 hours yesterday to translate all the infos, tmr I have to annoy my language partner with my horrible sentences... she rly needs to correct them.

before I had my other two presentations I was once thinking about how many languages I already used for giving presentations. and I realized I already presented things in 5 different languages, it pretty flashed me haha german, english, spanish, finnish and now chinese ... crazy, isnt it? no wonder my brain is so fucked up sometimes.

so, I basically do 5 things per day:

• I go to my courses and study there
• I go to the gym to work out (the gym is pretty awesome I must say, I go there pretty often these days. might it rly happen that I lose one or two kilos? Oh well, I doubt it)
• I meet up with my language partners to talk chinese and study
• I go home to write homework essays and to learn how to write new vocabulary
• I sleep ( I guess that's the most relaxing part - what a surprise)

doesn't sound to exciting, does it? but yeah, that's just the way life is, when you really LIVE here and not just.. hang around and continue travelling after a few weeks. daily life stroke me - even in China.

soon I need to get my first injection and I still dont know how to get it. I wrote an email to the german embassador - doctor but guess what: he didn't answer... oh I got to know that I wont get my scholarship the way they told me I would get it.... goodbye 1400 euros! *wave*

I was still too lazy to upload any pictures... next weekend I'm going to some temples (temples uigghh I've seen enough in Chengde). then u'll get to see some. maybe. maybe not.

It's been a while since the last time I have posted here, that's because uni soaks up all the time I have, my mother was visiting me - which was great- and I simply didn't feel like writing and uploading pictures. That hasn't changed. But I have the urge to write about what is going on in our world.

I guess you have all heard of the Occupy Wallstreet Movement, which started about three weeks ago in New York. I am pretty isolated here in Beijing, since it is impossible for me to buy any newspapers that I can actually understand, so the message took quite a while to reach me.

Anyways, today I read a lot about it and I must say, I totally support this movement. If I was in Vienna, you could definitely find me demonstrating tomorrow - even though I'm not the demonstrating kind of person. I do not like to sleep outside on the ground either. But this is totally worth it. So - listen up everyone! if you are in Vienna - go demonstrate. if you are in Linz - go demonstrate. if you are in Graz - go demonstrate! all over the globe there are going to be protests on the 15th of October, so tomorrow. inform yourself, whether there is a happening in your town too.

Right now I'm really in the wrong country. Demonstrating against capitalism in China doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? Oh btw, the response of China on the whole movement:

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China

The Chinese state news agency Xinhua said the protests had exposed "fundamental problems" with the US economic and political systems, and that it showed "a clear need for Washington, which habitually rushes to demand other governments to change when there are popular protests in their countries, to put its own house in order." (it is obviously copied from the English Wikipedia)

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China acts like the one guy in The Simpons who is always laughing at others.

CHINA --> HAAAHAAA "Usually it's me, who has that kind of problem, but now it's youuu" HAAAHAAA -----> USA

The movement has various webpages, especially one page is great - it's wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/ I really recommend you to have a look at it.

all of the picture that are being posted there are very touchy, some are even hard to read through until the end because I feel so sorry for the person. but I don't just feel sorry for the person, but I am also very proud - I am proud that there are so many ppl on this planet, who manage their lives so well, despite their many problems.

This picture I took directly from the page. i hope the person who uploaded it doesnt mind that I post it here. it shocked me in particular - see for yourself.

A dead person just talked to you. A dead person just told you his story. I have no words for that.

now I have been to the Great Wall. well it's a wall, a great wall. I don't know how I could explain it any better. It's just a big, long wall. It actually looks like on the pictures you see in travel guides and stuff. It was still awesome to be there. First time I was able to breathe in not so smoggy are than usual. I was able to see many trees at once. that was a very good feeling. First time China seemed "natural".

the part that I did not like about the wall was this woman. she is a seller, in her blue bag she carried stuff she wanted to sell us to superhigh prices. we started walking up the hill, so we can reach the wall, there already she started to walk with us. we said, no we don't want to buy anything, no no no. she didn't give a damn, she walked aaaall the way with us. about 2 hours. we were pretty much alone on the wall, except for her. annoying b***....

below you can see some images of the great wall, one is with a chinese guy, he was our tour guide. he LOVED taking picture. so typically chinese ... aaaand he had a little music box with him. it was so peaceful on the wall ... all of a sudden he plays Wiener Walzer or some other very irritating songs ...

after the great wall we went further to Chengde, it's a city about 250 km northern of Beijing. The emperors had their Summer Palace there back then and there are a bunch of temples, that all look the same to me haha we saw a huge statue, I think it was 23 meters high and had like a thousand arms. Chengde kinda looks like Las Vegas, everything was blinking and shining in different colors. omg and we ate so much on that trip ... 3 days, 4 times eating out in a restaurant .. pfff. insane. nearby the city there is a little mountain with a very ackward top, you will see it on the pictures. I have no idea why it is still standing, it looks so fragile. on one of the pictures below you can see a red Mao, this is made out of a very thin paper - it's the traditional chinese silhouette. it is incredibly detailed, take a closer look. in the northern part of the summer palace there is a huge park with a lake. many ppl just stood /set there, playing some traditional instruments. I wished I could have listened to them longer... also the tour guide played the fluite right next to the lake, you can see him on the right side on one pic !

and as usual, I have a few pictures of chinese ppl that I stalked, this time I focused on babies. their pants are very ... butt-free haha ;)

enough pictures for today.

yesterday evening, I was sleeping peacefully, when I was woken up by a mosquito attack. SSSSSSsssssssss..... so I turned on my small light. I looked to the corner of my room and so a black spot... what is that ?! A gecko! How much I love those small, often flying, animals that can just get anywhere they want ... I turned on the main light of my room. then it started running, half on the wall, half on the ceiling, directly to the air conditioner. then I couldn't see it anymore. what the hell is a gecko doing in my room in the 4th floor of this building ?! is it still in my air conditioner? wäääh :( and I thought Beijing is so far in the north that there are no creapy animals ...

my chinese courses still bug me.... Im supposed to talk to chinese ppl, so I get used to the language. how should I when I just cant say anything ?! the courses dont help that much, cuz we sometimes learn vocabulary I don't even know in english. yay... oh did I mention I hate chinese characters? well, I detest them. they make studying so much harder. I wanna continue studying finnish, that's so much easier ....

riding the bike in beijing is not as hard as I thought... the first 2 days I was quite scared but now Im fine. when you just have one almost-collision per ride, you are awesome! I am, because I nearly crushed into two girls today, yay :D haha

bargaining here is quite amusing ... a shirt I wanted to buy cost 150 yuan... so I said I give her 80. the seller was like, oh no, that is too little.. give me 100. no, 80. well then give me 90. NO, 80 yuan. this conversation took about 5 min, then I got the price I wanted haha

I rly wanna buy an electronical dictionary for studying chinese, it would make things so much easier. but I guess I have to pay about 100 euros for one here. so I was thinking... should I get an Iphone? cuz there are apps that can do the exact same thing as those dictionaries ... I'd like to have a new mp3 player too, so that would be included too. hmm but do I rly wanna have a Iphone?... I appreciate your tips, pls help me!

to complete my post for today, I want to show you this poem. I found it in a book that was in my room, it is by Emily Dickinson and called "little stone". I believe it's a wonderful poem, even though I hardly ever like poems. my new aim here in China is to be this stone - as redicolous as it sounds.

How happy is the little Stone

That rambles in the Road alone,

And doesn't care about Careers

And Exigencies never fears -

Whose Coat of elemental Brown

A passing Universe put on,

And independent as the Sun

Associates or glows alone,

Fulfilling absolute Decree

In casual simplicity.

There are four basic stages of culture shock: fascination, friendship, frustration and fulfillment.

ok. so when did I ever feel fascination here? I was not rly fascinated by anything ... I left out the friendship stage too and went right to frustration. it frustrated me that I was frustrated. on some days I'm fine but some days just suck ... when chinese ppl tell you " you are a foreigner, you don't understand" and just pull an annoyed face, it makes me just so mad. and my teachers tell me chinese ppl are very helpful and don't mind if they have to repeat something because you didn't understand something - that's so not true. once I asked a worker for help, she told me she is not in cahrge for that and I should wait for someone else. but no one came, so I asked her again "where is the other person?" - she just shook her head, hold her hand in the air and walked away. Welcome to China!

I guess that's the reason why I'm not really into studying Chinese. Why do I want to talk to people who treat me so badly? of course - if I could speak better, they wouldn't react the way they do. but right now and in the upcoming two or three months I will not be able to actually talk chinese. so where's the sense in all that?

Anyways, I did some sightseeing this weekend. I was at tiananmen square and the olympic stadium. the tiananmen square is so much smaller than I thought! and I must say .. It's not that impressive ... plus those guards are very irritating, but they are everywhere in china, in front of every bank, at the entrances of my uni ... just everywhere.

oh, that's opposit the "bird's nest" - the olympic stadium, it's a swimming hall for professionals ... it's a bubble building! I love it! bubbles bubbles bubbles .. :D

those soldiers where crawling around at the tiananmen square. chinese invasion !!! they make a robotic sound while crawling ... then they stop and make " bang bang bang bang" I guess they try to kill some dust grains ... DIE, DUST GRAIN, DIIIEEE muahaha. .... I bet the dust grains will win, they are obviously in the majority. I try to report about the development of this war later again.

extremely talented ....

there is one huge advantage here in china : everything is SUPER CHEAP. julia and I were shopping last friday, that's the outcome, about 70 euros spent for 5 pairs of shoes, a bag and several dresses and shirts. hmmm I like.

fun fact: the more I dislike China, the more I miss Finland. Shouldn't I miss Austria, instead? I decided to start studying Finnish studies in Vienna when I'm back. I hope this is not a temporary urge ... but I'm pretty sure it's not. Mä haluun taas opiskella suomea :)

( Henna: thanks for your comment. I told you AFS offers this kind of community service hehe I'm fascinated by the fact that you work so hard for your dreams, they will come true for sure - and let's not forget about our unplanned plan for 2012 :D btw I think I am also addicted to taking pictures of strangers :P )

so everybody, I took some pictures, so I can kind of show you how it looks like here. the pictures are not rly special, just daily life amusements for a 外国人 (foreigner) like me. first there's the picture, then some blabla.

I actually wanted to always post a song too, but since youtube doesn't work here (and pretty much all other video pages) it's hard to find songs. so if you feel like googling/youtubing, look for Aloe Blacc - If I. :)

I had a fight with my bed. I'm not sure who won. the slatted frame (Lattenrost) only covers 2/3 of the bed, for the rest someone used big wooden pieces which are higher in the bed than the slatted frame. can't rly explain it. however, now it's fine ( the question is for how long ?!)

That's going to be my only food picture, because food is always disgusting in photos haha but I just had to show you this: this is a portion of very delicious but very oily noodles from a canteen on the campus. I can't even eat all of it, no matter how hungry I am. so, guess how much this costs? 2 euros? or just 1 euro? wouldn't be 1 euro too cheap for such a huge portion of noodles?! I tell you what - this didn't even cost 20 cents. and it's good, it's filling, it's good food (I don't want to know how they cook it though).

yet, another pile of money. I put the cup on top of it so you have a size comparison. these are 19 200 yuan, I guess something between 1800 and 2000 euros. Im in love with that money ...

the red thing on here is my university ID :) and this stupid white thingy is the card of my bank account. gosh ... this card was a pain in the ass! we walked for half an hour to the bank of china ... we entered... said in chinese "we want to open a bank account" .. then some blabla .. the answer in english " we don't have enough cards to make you a bank account" what the fuck ?! have you ever heard of that? we thought they just want to get rid of those stupid foreigners who don't understand chinese. so on the next day we went to another agency of the bank of china (I needed an account from that bank, no other). same story, same problem "we don't have enough cards to make you a bank account" this joke was really not funny anymore. but as you can see, I managed to open an account. we were sent from the 2. bank to a 3. bank (loads of walking involved) there it took us 1 and a half hours to get the card. you cant imagine the good feeling leaving the bank with my card in my hands haha

now some pictures of the street scenery:

that's how the sun looks like when there is a normal amount of smog, I guess. Not that pretty.

hope you enjoy! :) ciaociao.

At the beginning, I was a little shocked because of our flat. The first impression was bad, but now I really don't give a damn. Chinese people are simply very inventive and try to save money at all times:

As you can see, that is our kitchen. It seems that all tiles in the back fell down once, so someone used a lot of sticky tap to put them back. Looks quite disgusting - but hey, it works!

Somehow I feel like being back in Finland because I don't understand a lot right now. The only big difference is, that I can't even read now - that is really disturbing, I don't wanna be an analphabet, it's so tiring. In my courses I understood max 30% of what was said. On thursday, my first uni day, I had to classes. We were about 13 people, of which 6 people or so were native speakers (most of them can speak fluently, they just cannot write and read properly). So they were chatting witth my professors and on my head appeared a huge questionmark. Luckily the organisators realized, that this kind of native speaker and not native speaker combination in a class doesnt work out, so from monday onwards I'm supposed to be in the B groups, which are hopefully easier. Let's see.

oh the weather! the first 2 days were pure hell, it was so humid and smoggy, you couldn't even see the top of buildings due to the smog. It was insane. But it rained and now I can see the blue sky, white clouds and the sun is dazzling me. Pretty bad welcome by Beijing.

I thought the most important sentence in China is going to be 我听不懂, I don't understand. But the Chinese don't give a shit if you understand them or not, they just continue talking!  Once we just left our building and there was an old woman, who started talking to us. I think she wanted to sell us something but I'm not sure. So we said like 10 times 我听不懂. She wouldn't care, to make us understand she was pulling at Julia's bag - erhm.. that was not very helpful, did she want to sell us bags?! Whatever, I still don't know what was the matter.

( that kind of reminds me of a finnish-not-understanding-story of mine. Toppi, the dog of my hostfamily, once ran away and I was alone at home. There was someone at the door, so I opened it. There were two finnish men. "Blablablablabla" "I'm sorry, I don't understand" "Blablabla koira (=dog) blablabla" "oooh koira?!" so they opened their car and Toppi jumped out. What a surprise :P )

Tschüss, Goodbye, Moikka and 再见!

This is the lake in the Beida campus. Yes, the campus is so big that there is enough space for a lake. I love the trees there:)

I'm a rich, white girl in China.