The first month in China
It has now been 25 days since I left 苏格兰 ready to begin my journey to study Mandarin at Tianjin Normal University. To think that over a year ago I was sitting in Tianjin hearing about this amazing experience and only wondering what it would be like. So far I feel like I have settled in well to the Chinese student life with the 8.30am classes and the continuous writing of Chinese characters every day after class.
From starting university about three weeks ago I have already seen my Chinese improve as I am now able to write some basic characters. In class our teacher had great enjoyment making up Chinese names relating to our English ones for everybody, I was given the name Suxin, 苏欣! Having a lot of free time allows us to learn much more about their culture, speaking to all the native Chinese speakers as we are forced to use all the Chinese words that we know, which for me isn’t many.
The picture below is what I have been eating for breakfast costing only 10元 which equates to about £1. One thing that I was worried about before coming to China would have to be the food. I was scared that I wouldn’t find anything that I would like, but China doesn’t have many western food places unless you’re willing to pay about 3 or 4 times on what you would spend on a Chinese dish. I now try and use google translate on my phone to see what it is that I am ordering in at the canteen but unfortunately, the translations don’t quite make sense. I’ve now resorted to looking at the menu which is only in Chinese characters and just picking a random dish to try out. I’ve been having these great meals which I would never have eaten if I was given it back home.
Last week the Mid-Autumn festival was celebrated all across China. The festival is for family members to come together, see the moon and eat moon cakes. For the festival we were allowed to get Friday and Monday off school to celebrate. A few of us were invited to join in with the celebrations with a Chinese family who were extremely welcoming, they took us to a market to pick fresh fruit and veg that they would later on cook for us. We were then invited back to their house and were taught how to make dumplings by their 10 year old son and he found our feeble attempt of making them rather humorous. Much to our surprise on the Tuesday we were told that we had to come into school on the weekend to make up for the holidays we had off!
When we aren’t studying we have been exploring the city and some of us have started to play football with some of the other foreign students at the university. This being a great opportunity as all of the foreign students speak different languages so we are having to communicate through the common language, Mandarin, luckily most of them do know some English which has been a great help.
Over the first couple of weeks we’ve all been so busy exploring and studying I’ve been able to make a short video of where we’ve been and what we’ve been up to so far in 中国.
You can watch the video here.