I have arrived in Shanghai, China!

Dear all,

To start off with I'd like to give you some simple advice, if you ever want to study in China, learn the language!

I arrived in China on September 1^st, I did not know where I had to go and definitely not how to get there! Luckily I arrived at Shanghai International Airport at 7:00 in the morning local time so I would have the whole day to figure out what was what. All I knew was that I had supposedly got a room at the Minghang Campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. However it was not yet clear to me whether this Campus was actually just a different part or actually somewhere else in the city. It turned out to be the latter. 



The first thing you notice when you arrive in Shanghai is the heat! The current temperature is between 30 and 35 degrees Celsius. The next thing is that you actually feel like an outsider. You are the odd one out, even at the airport. I went straight to the Airport Information Center where they spoke a little bit of English and in the end I arranged for a driver and a translator to take me to where I needed to be. In the end we drove for 1,5 hours because of traffic until we arrived at SJTU where we spend another half hour or more looking for the dorm I was hopefully going to get a room. In the end I saw other foreigners who pointed us in the right directions!!! I simply walked in to find my name on a piece of paper actually relieved that I had arrived where I needed to be without specific confirmation. All I got was a general email that said that if you applied for a room at the Minhang Campus, your room is secured.

My current room costs 5400 RMB per semester which is basically nothing to my standards, because that boils down to 136 euro's per month. But what you get is what you pay for. I have to share my 20sq/m room with my American roommate Casey. So that means in that space we have a bathroom, 2 beds, 2 desks, 2 closets and two egos. Luckily we can get along! The room is not clean at all, there is hair everywhere and the bathroom is growing every kind of mould known to man. When we arrived the toilet seat was brownish and was actually also broken. The door which we open with a card did not work and the linen were stained. So we complained to the manager or at least she looked like she was in charge with help of a local Chinese student. So they semi-fixed the door and installed a new toilet seat but the cleaning has to be done by us...

I live roughly 30km from the center of Shanghai, so that means that there are a lot less English speaking people living here and that in the local area no-one speaks English. Luckily I have downloaded some translation apps on my IPod with some basic sentences on it such as: "we have to go to", "ticket" and 100's of other useful translations. So that is how we get along. By we I mean my roommate, Casey, and me.

So the first day we met up with another American who has lived here for 8 years and was willing to show us around. After enjoying our first Chinese lunch, which was extremely spicy we went to a supermarket to buy basic stuff such as buckets, cleaning utensils, coat hangers, breakfast and water, because the water from the tap is slightly yellow. It is good to have him around because he could tell us which milk to buy and which water to buy etc. There are a lot of scams here in China with regards to health and safety. Two weeks ago a milk company was found to have been placing chemical waste in milk bottles and another who used tap water to fill water bottles. It is extremely difficult to find the right one. A rule of thumb is to never ever buy the cheapest brand. Why?! Because it isn't cheap for no reason. Here in China that means something entirely different than in Europe. And for the record cheap is cheap, so 12 eurocents for 1.5L water bottles. Popular international brands are expensive here because they are not subsidized by the government. So for Evian water you would pay 3,5 euro's per 1,5L. Which as you can tell is quite a difference from the local brand prices. In the end we bought several different kinds and tasted them. Some taste like metal, some smell like sewer and others were fine. We took pictures of the good ones to help us remember which they were. Because yes everything is in Chinese!

After that we started to get ourselves registered, there is no central desk that gives you a list of thing you have to do. Not many people speak English and the letters you sign and the have to carry with you are all in Chinese. So this was quite a hassle. You are continuously send from point A to point B. Trust me this is not like in Tilburg where you have to walk from building G to the library. It takes 45 min to an hour to walk from one end to the other end of campus. Over 20 minutes to drive around the campus in a car. There are busses that drive circles around the campus to help you get where you need to go. But of course you need a card to get on them which we did not have yet. After we thought to have figured everything out we came back to our room to find we no longer have electricity. We were told that you have to register to get an account on which you have to deposit to get electricity, again something no one tells you up front. So we got that sorted, again all in Chinese pointing to the lights and indicating that it does not work holding 100 RMB in our hands to pay...

After all of that we met up with 2 Chinese girls who were send by a professor which Casey had been in contact with. These girls were extremely nice and helpful. They helped us get cell-phones which took around an hour and all we wanted was to buy them because at the campus they handed out free sim-cards so all we needed was to buy a phone. So after a quick bite we returned to the room only to find we still did not have electricity. This was by the way at 23:00 so when we complained the lady told us to find a hotel. Luckily I'm pretty well traveled and know that they have to arrange other sleeping arrangements for us and otherwise pay for our hotel bill. Then the even better part of the story is that Casey is a 30 year old law student who pretty much told her that if it was not fixed tonight they would indeed have to pay us compensation. So after 1,5 hours some electrician came and fixed it for us! Casey slept in a hotel because he had booked it for 2 days. So I had my first night alone in Shanghai.