First week in China

Taxi driver within a glass hamster cage

Finally, I made it to do what I intended to do since a week – write my first blog post. In this post you will find a summary and impressions of the most important first week…

Blog is working, images get resized automatically and galleries can be made, so let’s start with the text… 😉

Okaaaay… leaving on Monday, 9th February 2009 for my semester abroad in Shanghai at the airport Vienna: changing planes in London, loosing boarding-card in airport, and welcoming other Salzburgian buddies in the second plane going directly to Shanghai.

Completely unspectacular travel to the accommodation: no airplane-crash, no control at customs/tax (by the way: it is strictly forbidden to import any food like Manner Schnitten, Stroh Rum or Zwetschenschnaps, therefore I did not bring it with me), got picked up by our Chinese friend and got driven by taxi for one hour:

This already got more spectacular, because in China car-drivers just do not care about other traffic participants and see traffic lights, bends or markings on the floor just as orientation guidelines and not as obligatory like intended. But if you think it’s the same than in Vienna, you get misled: Shanghai has several more traffic lines, several more cars and really – several times more aggressive drivers. And they do not shrink back (D: zurueckschrecken) to cross from the outer line to the inner one without using one winker – no problem for a real Chinese taxi driver… If you are in a hurry (like every Chinese) it is also no problem to drive into a crossing when the red light is on – therefore at every big crossing at least two up to four traffic policemen are standing and and using their policemen’s whistle (D: Trillerpfeife) to ensure that everybody is standing still when there is a red light. More or less this action helps… at least sometimes… So as you may imagine this is a big difficulty to cross a fife line street as a pedestrian and get not killed by one of the drivers in a hurry. In this week a cab driver got over one of the Vienna participants at People Square – nothing dramatically happened, but she got called at (D: angefahren werden).

Big gap in the windows of our first flat

Nils, my room mate from Salzburg, too, already arrived one day earlier and managed to get the flat we organized from at home. Firstly, agreed flat was very bad – you even have been able to look through the wall as you see in the picture. And with 5 degrees outside temperature and these windows we would have had more fun than we have now…

Professional Window Technicians repairing my window

Then we got a new apartment: Looks the same (its in the same building complex of 15 floor houses), but is better… 🙂 By the way: A 15 floor house is absolutely nothing special here!
But, also in our new flat we had some problems – even our 3 air conditionings with heating functions cannot make our flat warm, we found another “leak”… The window was not able to be closed completely, a two centimeter gap was just covered with the covering of the mosquito net in front of the window. Claiming, one worker in our flat calling another worker for help, both together pulling, dragging, pressing – but no change, another tool got brought – side cutting pliers (D: Seitenschneider) and hammer, everything which was clamping just got eliminated…

Maybe that was the reason why my flat-mate and me got ill… shivering, cold, some flu-like behaviour… but, after some medication – my friend got into hospital, a whole bag (D: Sackerl) of medicine and several infusions, i just got bought something at the 24 medicine selling automate at our reception – and, after putting us full with drugs – voila, next day we got better and better and right now we are nearly fully recharched… So we missed all lectures in the first week (except the last day – I was fit enough to participate) and got healthy again for the weekend… 🙂

In my next posts I will write about the funny packing style of other program participants, strange Chinese habits, the eating problem, the language problem (above 25 years nearly nobody speaks English – imagine to order in a Chinese restaurant with a menu in plain Chinese characters), University and our flat.