Im surprised how quickly I got used to everything here. Its a bit weird ... I expected myself to be excited, confused, sad and happy, all at the same time. Instead my feelings are very "neutral". People here basically do the same things than in any other country on the planet, so why should it be special? They have their own way of talking and everything but basically it's the same. They eat, go to work, take showers, talk to friends, buy things and stare at foreigners and tell you right in the face that you are one. Not that different to Austria or any other European country, is it?

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!