筷子

View over North-West
of Nanjing

It is amazing how easily people can get used to different customs – without even really noticing. About a week ago we went to eat in an indian restuarant and to my utter amusement I had to notice that I felt weird using knife and fork instead of chopsticks. Even though I must admit that I still have the occasional flying chicken wings when trying to eat with chopsticks. Hearing a rooster crow in the morning or small chicken right on the biggest street even though it's a million people city and people wearing pyjamas in public also almost lost its surprising moment. But there are also a couple of mysteries I still haven't quite solved: like some weird insects(?) that I got to see here quite often that look like a crossing between a bat and a butterfly. Some other riddles I finally got explanations for: e.g. the quite frequent outbursts of liting fireworks are probably part of weddings and therefore especially frequent on certain dates: Since „9“ (九jiǔ) is pronounced like the word for „long time“ (久jiǔ) it is considered a good number for a wedding date. Also the combination „5 2 0“ (wǔ ér líng) is supposed to sound like „I love you“ (我爱你wǒ ài nǐ). In general (e.g. phone numbers) „4“ (四sì) is really unpopular because it sounds like „to die“ (死sǐ), and „8“ (八bā) is probably the best number since it is (was/ still in some dialects) similar to „wealth“ (发fā). There's also a lot more to find in the Internet about this.





The mentioned high-rise

Right now there's a couple of holidays. We just had three days off for the „moon/mid-autumn festival“ (中秋节 zhóngqiújié) and now there's going to be a whole week off for the national holidays (to celebrate Mao's proclamation of the People's Republic). On the other hand in China this doesn't mean you really get these days off because instead you have to go to school on weekends, which meant that I spent the last weekend at the university. The upcoming week I'm probably going to be in Hongkong and the surrounding area (Shenzhen, Macau,…).

traditional chinese instruments
at the 中秋节 party

In Nanjing nothing very exciting happened so far. There was a small „party“ at the university for the foreigners right before the moon festival where everybody got some „moon cake“ (too sweet for my taste) and listen to classical Chinese instruments and Karaoke. We also went up the highest tower in the city (which is the 6^th highest tower in the world) and since we were completely underdressed for the cafe up there, the next time I'll remember and try not to embarass the waiters. Still, for European pries you can usually already enjoy some kind of lower luxury. Since wages are really low here, shops and restaurants can afford having more assistants and waiters than guests or clients. Classes are as normal, I wish I'd progress a little quicker but I guess you just need to give it time.

Oh, and just booked the tickets. So I'm going to come back to Germany over Christmas and New Years.

Living

View from the appartment

After consulting about three different realtors, and having looked at about 25 to 30 appartments, I finally found a suitable place to live in. I feel a little bad since realtors only get paid if they find you an appartment, so there was a lot of futile work involved, but on the other hand it's hard to feel any regrets sice I finally found my own place. In this matter you usually don't get a minute to think here: if you don't take an appartment right away, the next day it'll probbaly be taken by somebody else. One time I actually said I would sign the contract for an appartment quite close to the campus and when I got there I actually ran right into some other fellow students signung it, only because they came there 15 min earlier. Renting an appartment is a lot cheaper here than in Germany. Funnily enough the price is majorly based on the number of rooms and maybe a little bit on the location (getting more expensive the closer it gets to the campus), but size and quality do not really have an influence. Roughly said you always pay between 700-1300 元 (80-100 Euro) per room. Obviously you could always pay much more if you wanted to. Amazingly the prices for buying an appartment are basically the same as in Germany, maybe even more expensive.

Bad picture of my room
 - I'll take a better one later

From that point of view it wouldn't really make sense to buy one, especially taking into consideration that after the law you can only own a houses or any ground for 70 years, and after that it goes back to the state. But Chinese families in this area expect of the future husbands of their daughters that they have an appartment of their own, so everybody is trying to get loans to pay these insane prices. It gets even more difficult with many businessmen speculating on the home prices rising higher still, so in cities like Shanghai there are actually many appartments empty. It's a vicious cycle that eventually probably will have to end in a crash. On the other hand, the result is now that it actually isn't as great to have a son in the city anymore, like it was for families on the countryside. So at least the ratio women to men might return to a normal level through this weird situation.

Ophelie and I paying rent

Like I said the market is really fast, and it is also common to pay for an appartment at least 3 months in andvance. This starts to be funny if you consider that the highest bill in China is worth 10 Euros. So renting an appartment feels a little bit like doing something really illegal with a big bunch of money.

Maybe now would be the point to once again try and explain how my living situation has actually been earlier. After living in the appartment of Xin, Christine and Flavio, I had to move to a youth hostel, which was actually really good. The owner, Linda, helped us with most things, and most importantly helped us find an appartment. Now, I'm living in a 3-room apartment with a nice French girl, Ophelie, who's going to be studying in yet another Nanjing university. There was still a lot of cleaning to do after getting the appartment, but now it's looking quite alright. On foot it's about 15-20 min to the building where I have my lectures and it's pretty close to a Xinjiang restaurant.

At the beginning I was still really ambitious to find some chinese roommate, but it is really hard. The guys usually share a room (which is just a little too close for me for a whole year) and the girls are either forbidden to live with other men from their parents or they are out to find a rich foreigner. I didn't want to rush into anything, so I put this decision of; Ophelie is only here for half a year and then I'm going to think about it again.

Chinese life, I'm coming!

Mochou Lake

There's been a lot happening over the last couple of days. I found my own apartment -which I will say more about later- got most of the paper work done we have to do and already spent a couple of days at the university with classes. I got placed in an intermediate level which I guess suits me very well, classes aren't as great as they were in Trier, but they seem to be alright. In the hostel where I stayed I got to meet many foreigners, which doesn't help my Chinese, but I do enjoy the international atmosphere. I got to practice my Polish and even a little bit French throughout the past days (and obviously English as well). I got to see the Museum of the Nanjing Massacre where about 300000 got slaughtered by the invading Japanese troops in World War II, went to Xinjiekou, which is the biggest shopping district of Nanjing, and got a glimpse of the Mochou Lake in the city which looked really great.

Huge food market we
found by accident

Foodwise I spent the first 5 days eating only Chinese food. Afterwards my stomach decided it wanted something else so I switched to Mcdonalds, a German bakery and a Turkish restaurant. Now I'm switching back and forth between Chinese and Western food. Most of the Chinese stuff is just really weird and usually the smell doesn't make me get hungrier either, but that might still come, I'm just not used to it yet. And like most Weterners would make the mistake to offer dairy products and sweets to chinese people without considering that there's a big chance they won't like it, many people here seem to keep forgetting that only a few of us would consider chicken legs and claws a small snack like chips.

Other things for example I'm basically already used to, like babies not wearing pampers but just having a big slit in their pants and peeing in the middle of a crossing in front of a big bank. (Alex in Shanghai put up a nice picture of that:http://howtodowtle.tumblr.com/ ); women using umbrellas to not get tanned, people putting a stamp on your receipt after shopping (which I still don't really see the sense in), and little kids shouting „Mama, mama, a foreigner“.

Bamboo is even used
on really big buildings