Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Ouch $@*&!
Now you might be thinking those are just the basics and what are the extravagant amenitites we get. Well, the reality here in China is most people do not own their own bathroom. In fact, we quickly learned that the students at our approximately 8,000 person university are required to share dorms. We are not talking your 1-2 people or even 2-4 individuals per room, it is a minimum of 8-10 students per dorm room. That's right, bunkbeds reach 5 high on each side of their room. If they are lucky and are accepted into grad school they will be fortunate enough to share a room with only 5 others. On top of this, all students shower and wash up in one central location, having to walk outside and sometimes roughly a city block to use a bathroom. Each visit requires them to pay 2-3 jiao (about 5-10 cents U.S.) to receive access to hot water. Learning all this we greatly appreciate our apartment that much more.
Just to give you a better idea of our apartment setup. We have a good sized living room space complete with furniture, a computer with Internet access, and a television. We only get access to a handful of channels that we can understand like CNN World, BBC, and a Spanish network we have never heard of in Spain. The rest of the channels are Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Arabic. Our bedroom is very good sized with just enough closet space. We have an outdated but useful kitchen (see picture). It has a strange stove top, refrigerator, and washing machine but it works for us. The bathroom is decent too. It provides us with hot water, a clean toilet, and a reliable sink. The only down part is that the hot water here smells a little funny. Then of course we have different voltage here. It was a good thing that I purchased a converter before we left. We use it for the bathroom area. They provide us with one for the living room but no where else. We also have a very small eating area with a table and four stools. Lastly, since we are on the fourth floor we have a balcony. It is enclosed and all glass, so it is okay but nothing spectacular. It gives us a view of the neighboring school--Communications University of China, Beijing.
After settling in and getting our room in order at 10:30am we met Ding Li, one of our two host coordinators, for a tour of the campus. Upon meeting Li we noticed she spoke very good English. She mentioned to us that she studied journalism for a year at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. She said how it was such a culture shock for her. We spent the next two hours conversing and visiting various buildings. The BISU campus is decent sized, nothing massive by any means. It's about the size of the College of Idaho's campus, but just not as spacious. Building after building is crammed into the campus walls. It's interesting how foreign countries build walls and have guarded gates that surround the entire campus. This is not the first time we have noticed this. Another interesting side note is that the campus is continually growing and not for reasons of traditional western thinking. No, here in China we learned that once a professor retires, he or she is given housing for life. Yes, for life! Talk about a retirement plan. For this reason there is half a dozen five story apartment buildings for retirees. We wondered why we saw so many senior-aged individuals on campus and this answered that question.
Once we finished our tour we were ready to tackle shopping. It turns out that across the street from the campus there is a very affordable supermarket. We made our way there and decided to fumble through buying groceries. We set the rule that we would not buy meat, at least not until we knew what was okay and not okay to eat. The honest truth was it was hard to shop. This was our first real experience of being a "foreigner" to a country where we knew almost nothing of the language. Slowly, we found items we recognized like tuna fish, soy milk, soda, Gatorade, and breads. Some how Adán fooled a woman in the bakery into thinking he knew Chinese and was able to get two chocolate muffins. It was hilarious. Pazi did a good job of noticing that a lot of the food items throughout the store had expiration dates that had passed so we steered clear of dairy and meats. Ultimately, we bought enough food for about three days and it cost us less than $10 US dollars. Food is cheap in China for Westerners.
We arrived home shopping bags in hand surviving our first full day in Beijing. We were proud of our accomplishments and celebrated with tuna sandwiches and Chinese noodles.
After settling in and getting our room in order at 10:30am we met Ding Li, one of our two host coordinators, for a tour of the campus. Upon meeting Li we noticed she spoke very good English. She mentioned to us that she studied journalism for a year at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. She said how it was such a culture shock for her. We spent the next two hours conversing and visiting various buildings. The BISU campus is decent sized, nothing massive by any means. It's about the size of the College of Idaho's campus, but just not as spacious. Building after building is crammed into the campus walls. It's interesting how foreign countries build walls and have guarded gates that surround the entire campus. This is not the first time we have noticed this. Another interesting side note is that the campus is continually growing and not for reasons of traditional western thinking. No, here in China we learned that once a professor retires, he or she is given housing for life. Yes, for life! Talk about a retirement plan. For this reason there is half a dozen five story apartment buildings for retirees. We wondered why we saw so many senior-aged individuals on campus and this answered that question.
Once we finished our tour we were ready to tackle shopping. It turns out that across the street from the campus there is a very affordable supermarket. We made our way there and decided to fumble through buying groceries. We set the rule that we would not buy meat, at least not until we knew what was okay and not okay to eat. The honest truth was it was hard to shop. This was our first real experience of being a "foreigner" to a country where we knew almost nothing of the language. Slowly, we found items we recognized like tuna fish, soy milk, soda, Gatorade, and breads. Some how Adán fooled a woman in the bakery into thinking he knew Chinese and was able to get two chocolate muffins. It was hilarious. Pazi did a good job of noticing that a lot of the food items throughout the store had expiration dates that had passed so we steered clear of dairy and meats. Ultimately, we bought enough food for about three days and it cost us less than $10 US dollars. Food is cheap in China for Westerners.
We arrived home shopping bags in hand surviving our first full day in Beijing. We were proud of our accomplishments and celebrated with tuna sandwiches and Chinese noodles.
