The Joys and Pains of Moving In

Luck was most certainly with me on my flight from Vancouver to Shanghai, because there were many empty seats on this flight, and I was able to move from my original, cramped space, to a few empty seats, where I gleefully claimed an entire row as my own personal territory.

A high accurate representation of what I looked like on the flight.

After my wonderful plane flight, I found myself at Shanghai's Pudong Airport, where a driver was waiting to pick me up and drive me directly to the foreign student dormitories. There's a pretty humorous anecdote here: Once I had reached the arrivals section of the airport, I could not find anyone with a sign holding my name! Rather than stand around like a deer in the headlights, I walked up to some folks at the information desk, and ordered them to call my contact number for Suzhou University - which was conveniently written on my university acceptance letters - and told the folks to tell my contact to phone my driver to order him to come to the information desk where I was waiting! After 10 minutes of annoyed waiting, the driver showed up with a dumbfounded look on his face, profusely apologizing to me. It turns out he had a sign with my name on it, but he had forgotten to hold it up!

I'm the fellow on the left, and the airport employees/driver are the fellow on the right

Having successfully with that little debacle like a proverbial "bull in a China shop" (pun intended), my driver took me to my car - a nice-looking Volkswagen - and drove me without incident to my dormitory building in Suzhou.

My driver and the car I was driven in - taken in Pudong Airport's parking lot

Once I arrived at the university, my driver was nice enough to help me up with my luggage to my dormitory room, which is located on the fifth floor!

The entrance to my building - notice the lack of an elevator

The daunting view as we arduously trekked up the stairs

When I got to my room, I was greeted by my roommate, a Mexican fellow name Miguel, who has only just started to learn Chinese.

 Pictured: Miguel at his computer in our dorm room

I was worried, at first, that I'd have to attempt to converse with Miguel in my pitifully butchered - and mostly forgotten - high-school Spanish. As luck would have it, Miguel speaks fairly decent English, so we speak with one another in a strange form of English with some chunks of Spanish and Chinese vocabulary thrown in to fill the gaps.

Like this, but not a stupid Adam Sandler romantic comedy

Today, I managed to register and complete my placement tests for my classes to determine what level of Chinese language I should be put in. I was rather worried about this because the Chinese characters I wrote on these particular tests were the first ones I'd written in several months, and regardless of the fact that I've been reading some Chinese-language books and watching some Chinese movies, I felt my practical skills in the language were absurdly rusty at best. Despite my expectations to be tossed into a mid-level class, the testers decided to place me in the most advanced language class in the university. 

It turns out my efforts to read Harry Potter in Chinese weren't frivolous after all

After being told of my placement test results, the folks in the office subsequently told me that I'd probably be put into a different dormitory room next week- one where I didn't have a roommate - because the administration likes to put students of the same level together with one another - and seemingly give special treatment to the upper level students. I was very much pleased with this since my current dorm room is more than a little filthy. I'll post some pictures of my bathroom to illustrate. 

It's hard to see, but there's gunk and mold everywhere - and pictures cannot even describe the ungodly smell

The last thing I'll talk about before finishing are the Chinese students themselves. I didn't realize until I came here to the university that all Chinese university students must, in their first year, undergo some basic military training, so there are literally thousands of young Chinese men and women marching around in blue army uniforms, standing in formation, and chanting slogans that, from a distance, sound very similar to the Bane chant from The Dark Knight Rises! In fact, I woke up this morning listening to their dulcet tones.

Pictured - China's finest defending the nation from the evil imperialist forces of capitalism (ie. the Japanese, Russians, and Americans)

With that, dear reader, I will leave you (hopefully) eagerly awaiting my next blog post. Here's some good music to get you in the spirit of defending the nation from the evil imperialist forces: