Everyday China

There are a few things in everyday life in China that i do differently here than back in Sweden.

First thing i think of is the bathroom...
Public toilets like in tourist spots, restaurants, airports, schools etc are a bit different than in Europe.
In China they have squat holes in the floor that you squat above to pee, and you have to bring your own tissues most of the time as well. There is always a sink for you to wash your hands in but if they have soap is another question, i am surprised when public bathrooms have tissue or soap.
These toilets smell a lot, and i mean a lot if they are not cleaned regularly. The cleanest public bathroom i have seen to be honest was at the club, in Sweden the clubs have some of the nastiest bathrooms in my experience but here they clean them constantly all through the night, i guess they don't want the place to smell like urine.

On the subject of bathrooms...
The showers in our dorm have certain times during the day when there is hot water.. 6-8 am, 11.30-14  and 17.30-00.00. We are lucky though as we get to have private showers, the Chinese students have to take showers together in a separate building from their dorm and with no privacy.

Something that i as an exchange student don't have to deal with is curfew, the Chinese students' dorms get locked at 11pm. The dorms for the foreign students, however, are never closed so we can come and go as we please.

The university has a cafeteria. Yes there is a cafeteria on campus and it has 5 floors with different types of food and different prices. As a student here you get a student card, which you load with money so you can pay for your meals at the cafeteria. In the basement, which is the cheapest floor, you can get a whole plate of dumplings for just 5 yuan. Most things are cheap overall in the cafeteria compared to how much it would cost in Sweden to buy lunch everyday. They serve food from 6 am to 10 pm, only the basement is open till 10 pm though.

These are a few things i thought of now but i have more to tell but this entry is long enough already.
Now i will watch some Netflix and finish my 5 yuan ice coffee i bought after dinner.

Typical Chinese toilet.

The beginning of the blog

So i have now been in China for a month and i was hoping i would have blogged more but the blogging site i was going to use was not working for me properly when i felt like blogging so it was too much of a hassle so now i have decided to use my regular blog site instead.

There are many things i could say about China, in fact there are so many things i wanna say that i feel overwhelmed every time i am gonna write about it. So i will make a short post this time i think and maybe try to make several ones covering different subjects in the future.

I am enjoying China a lot but i am also missing the security of being home, it is a bit challenging at times for me with my social anxiety but i try to do the best i can and hopefully when i go home some of my problems won't be as hard anymore.

After i had been here for about 2 weeks i first got a cold and during the time i had that i also got a stomach virus. This has made things somewhat a bit harder for me as it makes me a bit nervous about food, for obvious reasons. I am slowly gaining back my trust for food though but something that is still very hard for me to eat is noodles, which is a big part of the cuisine in Jinan.

Jinan is the capitol city of the Shandong province and this is where i study. It is not one of the biggest cities in China but for a Swedish person it is very large since it has more inhabitants than all of Sweden.

There are many things as i've said that could be said about everything but it is too much to put in one post so i will stick to one subject at the time in future posts.

Here is a picture of Baotu Spring in Jinan, a very beautiful place.