Chengdu, 2014-08-26 23:59:28 +0800
Day 2 in China
Today I moved to East Overseas Students Dormitory. It’s the first time in my life that I live in a dormitory, and I hope the obvious inconveniences will soon be compensated with rich social life and Erasmus-grade parties. If you want my new address, please contact me on Facebook or by e-mail: dmuhafc (at) gmail (dot) com.

After I had some sleep during the day, I began to see the city brighter colors. I met a few nice people, including two girls from Korea, one guy from Yemen, and one from Syria.

Water. I have the feeling that the most useful Chinese character radicals (a part used to index characters in dictionaries) in Chengdu are 氵/水 (shui3 or three drops of water) and 雨 (rain.) Some of the words you can make with them include: 雨傘 yu3san3 — umbrella; 雲 yun2 — clouds; 開水 kai1shui3 — hot water; even my university campus is called Wangjiang 望江 &mdash “overlooking the river”, the river being the famous Yangzi.

Last night I went out with a few Chinese I met at the hostel. This already showed that traveling alone may be beneficial in language practice—we spoke Chinese all the time, and I was happily surprised when they asked me if I knew the word 高瑞大氣上檔次. It was a word that we learned in listening comprehension class back in Poznań, and it seemed too complicated to be useful back then. We went to eat 烤魚 kao3yu2, or baked fish. We ordered it in a small family restaurant in a street close to the hostel, brought back and ate from two common bowls (there were no real bowls so they used plastic containers for selling tiny tubes of toothpaste and bottles of shampoo from the minishop at the reception.) I think they said it was a specialty from Chongqing, and just as all Sichuanese dishes it was very spicy, really tasty (if you haven’t tried it, you can never imagine its taste,) and I had to fish for edible pieces with my chopsticks, leaving behind a liquid mixture of pepper, Sichuanese pepper, chilli pepper and the like. Then some foreigners came and we ended up drinking Snow beer and playing a silly (and potentially deadly) alcoholic game of cards.

– – Buying a SIM card. I also managed to buy a Chinese SIM card. The word “manage” is not exaggerated at all. When I first went out shopping during the day to buy beddings (129 kuai,) green tea (16.90 kuai) and toilet paper (9.90 kuai¹,) I didn’t have my passport with me. Then I took the passport from the dormitory and went in the opposite direction to an outlet of China Telecom***, buying on the way shower gel (23.50 kuai,) a Chinese-style teacup (25 kuai,) tiny bananas and a jin of apples (15.50 kuai.) I was told that I can’t buy a card with my passport and that I needed a Chinese ID card—which in turn required being granted Chinese citizenship, and that’s something I had rather not do, because I like the freedom of wandering around in Schengen too much. So I went back to the first shop I visited and got a card of 中國聯通 (100 kuai.) My Chinese number: (+86) 185-8399-3732.

– – – Dormitory Bathrooms ;( As I came to Chengdu through Confucius Institute Scholarship and I don’t pay for the dorm, I was given the cheapest available room, a double room in the East Dorms. I don’t mind sharing the room as long as the roommate I get is OK, but the problem is that there is no bathroom in the room and I have to use the shared ones, one for the whole floor. All toilets (or, to be precise, both) are Asian, i.e. squatting style. That is because the toilets are shared by about forty people of various nationalites on each floor You can’t sit on it, and the joyous ritual of going for number two with a good book or magazine automatically ceses to exist—alas! What a loss! As a lazy foreigner, I consider this type of toilets to be debilitating. Also, similar to many other places in Asia, the sewage system is too narrow to let through toilet paper so you have to throw it into a trash bin.

Chengdu, 2014-08-27 03:17:47 +0800
Day 3 in China
+ + Bubble tea. Good news for bubble tea lovers: it’s really cheap in China. There are many flavors to choose from and it costs 5-8 kuai, which is quite something, compared to the prices in Poland — up to around 17 PLN, or 35 kuai. Bad news: only tapioca. So, unfortunately, for an ultimate bubble tea experience, you may have to visit Taiwan, where it originated.

Footnotes

1. Kuai — 塊/块 kuai4, a colloquial word for the Chinese currency, yuan. In fact, you can tell that a person doesn’t speak Chinese at all if they use the word yuan in English. ↩