別の外人

Right, so this week was my first week at class.

Monday, ended up getting up early (again AGH I HATE THIS SO MUCH) for the medical, which was... let's just call it interesting and leave it at that. Well actually that's no fun xD

We arrived at the building at the godunearthly hour of 8AM SO NOT NATURAL and parked outside was a bus type thing. The first thing that came into my head was 'death bus' o_0 then we thought it might take us to the hospital, but no, apparently it WAS the hospital... which was odd. We had to show a random pamphlet (though I'd lost mine and talked my way past it), were given a number on a piece of paper, and had to queue. Then we were given a checklist to make sure we had our:
passport
visa
residence permit
passport photos x 3
student card

which of course we all did, and then in groups of 5 we had to move chairs and sit on chairs in a hallway, where they checked we had all the right shiz, and then we were moved in small groups into another room with tables and chairs (SO MUCH MOVEMENT) and given long and complicated forms to fill out (do you have TYPHOID?? WELL DO YOU?? What about the PLAGUE?? I felt so medieval... and wanted to sing Weird Al 'get medieval on your hiney' lalala). You'd be half way through the multiple page form, and then someone would finish and get to go and talk to someone about the form, so a seat would become free, and instead of getting new people to sit there, they'd make everyone move up a seat. CONSTANTLY. Eventually I went up to the desk, they took things off me, gave me more things, sent me to the next person... times by 5,and eventually you end up with a form the medical people have to fill in (apart from your temperature, height and weight which we're meant to know, and Jo guessed her weight and the guy CHANGED IT how harsh T_T)

Then we went to someone who took away our passports and residence permits, who then sent us to the SURPRISE BLOOD TEST woman which was not nice. She tied a piece of plastic cable round my arm, then quickly stuck the needle in and took blood (no idea how much, I wasn't looking, after I knew she had a clean needle I shut my eyes and repeated 'bu yao bu yao' over and over again). We then were given cotton wool and told to hold it on the site for 5 minutes, but yet we had to instantly move from one wooden chair to another. Then we sat on more corridor chairs, and then were sent to the medical van. We had to put on sterile blue plastic things over our shoes to keep the van sterile, but we put them on OUTSIDE and stood on the dirty ground in them before going in... First thing, bras off and time for chest x-ray. I had to take off my St Christopher pendant, first time I've done that since leaving, not doing it again. Was a bit weird, and then I went for an eye test and blood pressure test. I took a while to answer the eye test questions as I can't do left and right very well normally xD Finally was ultrasound (I saw my insides on a tv screen, was so bizarre) and an EEG which felt like being clamped to a table before torture. Then, we were free xD Went to go get food (pink wafers, yum...?) coz was feeling a bit faint as you're not allowed to eat beforehand, and then it was time for class.

Class. We were told this level would be perfect for us... how ridiculous. We 'learnt' as our grammar point,

'tai hao le' which means 'how good'. We did this at Christmas in Leeds... plus we spent an hour and a half (one period) on one lesson, and didn't even finish it, whereas with Ning Yi we did 2 lessons in an hour. We came out bored out of our minds as we even knew all the vocab. In the afternoon, Adele and Jo decided to go sit in on someone else's class to check out that level, but me, Abi and Nerys stayed and studied. That evening, we panicked and researched how to switch classes.

The next day, I was suffering a bit from some dodgy food from a street noodle seller near the university, and didn't go in. By the evening, was feeling a lot better so studied ready for class the next day. Jo went to the office to try and switch classes, and ended up being moved into the complete beginners class, aka the 'ni hao' class. This is ridiculous, as she's so good at Chinese.

Wednesday morning, we all got up early to go to the office and try to move class, we eventually got through to the guy that we needed the timetable for another class after the first period was over, so we decided to go and buy our new textbooks for the new class instead of launching into the harder class with speaking class, which is definitely our weak point. Then it was off to Kesongfang (Croissants de France) for cakes and naicha/other random drinks :)

On Thursday was our first day of class at the correct level... it was definitely the correct level. There are some lovely Japanese women in our class, our friend Snow from Guam is in the same level, and there's a cool guy called Igor. Which is an awesome name. However very quickly class gets boring because we move so much slower in China than we did in Leeds... sadly enough. Listening class was actually really hard as well as really boring, and we've been told we should buy the cassette tapes so we can do the work outside of class... come on, 20th century and all, why not CDs?? Still, we're learning new stuff now, so yay :)

Friday we only have class in the afternoon, which was nice, but we ended up having to get up at 8am because we had been told that in order to transfer to a higher level class, we'd have to sit another placement test, so all week we had been frantically revising for this exam. We arrived, and were told that in fact we didn't need to do a test at all. I think it was thanks to Jo, who mentioned the fact that the teacher from the lower level class said we should move and the teacher in the higher level class said we'd be fine in her class, and since we haven't really stood out as not being up to scratch, we're all officially now in Elementary 3, like pretty much everyone else from Leeds, bar I think 3 people. Yay ^_^ Class made us quite sleepy as we'd been up for a fair few hours already, and after class we went to the supermarket and then back to our respective homes to get ready for the night out :D

Night out was epic: first we went to the hotel and drank some beer there, then went to a student night bar thing which Connie had been given a flyer to previously, which was a 5/10 minute walk away from campus. It was pretty good, packed, but they had a 15RMB offer on on some drinks which was good. We got some seats, I saw some people I recognised from class, then I saw Connie talking to people who I thought were randomers, so thought 'I wanna talk to randomers too' and wandered on over to some random guys who turned out to be HORRIFICALLY posh, (prob didn't help that they went to Durham for BA and Masters) in Shanghai to 'rediscover themselves' (their words not mine) and in suits. I left quickly :P Ended up chatting in French for about an hour to this half French half Chinese guy, and kept trying to make Abi talk to him in French too, poor girl was not happy xD Nerys got to speak German to a Swiss German bloke, and then I think the bar was shutting as everyone went outside to a pavement and tried to get a taxi, we ended up, all 5 of us, fitting into one taxi, going a long way to this random bar someone had told us to go to, I think it was Sophie, and eventually came out of the taxi onto this fairly deserted street in the middle of nowhere. There was a bar, we went in, and lo and behold there were some of the people we knew.

Turns out the bar was in Jing'an (which is FAR from Xujiahui), but we got free drinks and the bartender was awesome, if very random. He was called Ian and he bust a rap for us (well several) which was bizarre. We then got another taxi and went to a club and danced for a bit, til some random Chinese guys came and started being pervy, at which point we left and ran up and down the taxi queues asking them if they'd take 5 girls in one (there must've been a police station near by as they all refused). In the end, me and Jennie got one together to my address and she walked back from there. A very cheap night :D Fell asleep after 4am... whoa.

Next day was woken up at 11am, all confused, by an AIR RAID SIREN. Seriously. Air raid sirens. Incredibly loud, the siren itself must have been nearby as it seemed to permeate everywhere. This was terrifying. It was apparently the first time since 1946 that there has been an air raid siren sounded anywhere in the world, but yet weirdly enough I still was able to recognise exactly what the sound was... And then I panicked. Didn't know whether to run to a metro station, stand in a doorway like you do for an earthquake, didn't know how to tell if it was a drill or a warning... so I looked out of the window. THERE WAS NOBODY ABOUT AND ALL THE CARS WERE DRIVING IN ONE DIRECTION. I then proved my geekiness by... checking on Google. Luckily 2 weeks ago in the Independent, they said that there would be a city-wide drill in Shanghai. It is apparently the first 'National Defence Awareness Day' and this drill will happen every year from now on... Just my luck that it was the first one when I was here. It's basically a macho show against Taiwan.

That afternoon, after I'd recovered a bit more, we went to People's Square to go shopping... I think I need to change my standards a bit, as I wanted to buy clothes but while looking around could only think of the Western-style stuff I wanted to buy. We ended up going and sitting in People's Park, drinking naicha and eating meat off a stick. We then saw lots of pieces of paper attached to hedges and walls with people reading them and other people standing by them, so we wandered over to one poster that was all by itself. They were lonely hearts adverts, well sort of... they were for parents to go along and look at, to find a partner for their child, introduce them, and hopefully get them married before they got too old. We were looking at this one sad poster, of this fairly unattractive 30 year old guy, when this old guy wandered up to us, and then we realised he was this guy's dad... and even worse, his son was standing nearby!!! We were terrified we'd end up with some sort of Chinese husband, so we hurriedly left, and ended up walking into this massive queue for Haagen-Daaz who were selling commemorative Moon Cake flavour icecream at an extortionate price. How random. We eventually left, went home for a nap then everyone came round mine for food from the street sellers near me, and then beer :) We also had some fun discussions about the previous night, including being told that we were singing crap songs in a taxi at 3am xD Mostly cheese, so we listened to a load of cheese til everyone went home at about 1am.

Sunday, today, I actually did nothing, which was wonderful. Was in bed til about 4pm, went out to get food, then came back. Some of the others came over for a bit (and food) but that was it. I really think I needed a day of just nothing, as I've been busy every day since leaving England on the 28th August. And now I feel much more well-rested. Tomorrow I don't have class til the afternoon, so I'll get lots of sleep tonight too. We've made vague plans for next weekend, we'll see if that ends up happening :)

And a quote... "Oh, he's Kazakhstani? Is his name actually Borat?" - oops *blush*