— David @ 8:34 pm

So I arrived on the Saturday night, spent Sunday sleeping and was teaching on the Monday. I was exhausted come the end of the week, and i’m still, going to bed every night at 9pm and waking up at 5.

The campus is on the edge of Changchun (pron Changchoon) and is about 5 miles from the downtown. The city itself is huge. It’s larger than London, and the centre of the city is quite spectacular, with many tall buildings. There is also a huge railway station and lots and lots of shops, many of which are underground, in the many miles of tunnels dug by Pow’s during the Japanese occupation.

My apartment is quite nice, the floors are wooden and I have two bedrooms, one of which I have turned into a study. It is on the ground floor in a block of buildings reserved for teachers and other simular workers. I have a very good new shower, although the Chinese do not have a cubicle, they simply tile the whole bathroom and have the shower in the corner.
My kitchen is typically communist looking, with bland wooden cupboards – but I have a new oven and microwave, as well as a rice cooker, electric hob, and lots of various pots and pans.
Most importantly it’s situated on campus.

There are in total 9 foreign teachers here at the University, 2 are Japanese, 2 are Canadian, 3 are American, and there are two Britons.
The most difficult thing to get used to is the constant staring and curiosity in westerners. People will turn around and point at you, EVERYBODY takes a second glance at you, it is like being the prize fish in an aquarium.
In a city of over 7 million, there are only 300 foreigners, I am yet to see anyone foreign, other than those who I know on campus.
The language is very very difficult to understand, but I am learning, and I have a good Chinese teacher. So I hope that in a few months time I will be able to get by easily.

Overall, this place is so alien to anything I have experienced before. IT is hard to put into words the sheer difference between China and Britain. Everybody has a mobile phone, yet there are still horse and karts on the roads. Such a fascinating place.

The campus is in the process of being re-developed, and there is quite a bit of building work going on. The Chinese don’t bother with silly health and safety rules, and most mornings, I will quite literally walk straight through the centre of a building site to get to my classes. Communism has some peculier traits, especially that it seems to take ten men to do the job of one. For example, the shops are always overstaffed, there is always more staff than actually required to run a business in the free market. But I guess, they have to create as many jobs as possible for the 1.6 billion that live here.

I will take some more photos tomorrow and try to post them onto the website, firewall permitting.