Before leaving I promised friends and family a blog and after about 8 months I have finally taken some time to write out some of the notes I have collected in my diary and share them on the internet. And I know the tenses, spelling, grammar and other parts of the english language are used rather poorly but just accept it and I promise I will include a lot of pictures to make up for the poor writing. Originally I had planned to create a blog as I arrived but somehow this never happened. Firstly because blogger.com isn't accessible without a VPN or proxy connection due to the great chinese firewall. Another reason was that I simply felt too tired from training everyday and preferred just writing by hand compared to typing notes out on my laptop. Either way these are the posts that you have been expecting, luckily blogger has a function to change the post dates. So for example the post "The academy and people" has a date in January so this won't include any events beyond that month.
Anyway I left home (South Africa) on 30 December 2009 and spent 3 days including new years celebrations in Germany with my friend Tammo. Because I had this planned departing and saying farewell from home wasn't as bad I had expected. Only when I was on my flight from Europe to China it struck me and I realised what I had embarked on, truly mixed emotions.
I left Zurich on 3 January at about 13:00 and arrived in Shanghai almost 12 hours later at around 7:10am on 4 January (note the 6 hour time difference, 7 hours from South Africa).
On the runway in Zurich, the point of no return...
The weather in Shanghai was average, about 8 degrees but very misty with poor visibility, the airport was huge, grey and rather depressing. After collection my luggage I bought my ticket to Changchun on Shanghai airlines (which was more difficult than expected, not many people speak english), where my escort would be waiting for me. After a 5 hour wait and a 1 hour delay I finally set off north to Changchun. The snacks on the flight were questionable and I ended up only eating the raisins.
After a 3 hour flight which felt like an eternity the aircraft was finally making it's descent into Changchun. I will never forget this day, because when I looked outside all I could see was white, I have experienced winter in Montreal which is cold however this was on another level. Needless to say the temperature outside was -38 Celsius (-36 Fahrenheit if you're American).
Changchun Airport
After collecting my luggage I made my way to the arrivals area to meet up with my escort/driver, I was slightly anxious, excited and nervous but felt at ease when I was greeted by a friendly chubby chinese man.
After about 4 hours of driving through snow and ice at about 40km/h we finally arrived at the academy at around 21:00. When I arrived I was welcomed by two friendly translators called Nelly and Vera. The academy not only houses male and female foreign students but also chinese kids from ages 6-14 years. They showed me my room and gave me some food which was significantly better than I was expecting.
My room wasn't great, it had a bed, a coat rack and two cupboards for my clothes. The room was also freezing but still I was happy because I didn't need to share a room. I couldn't shower because I had arrived after the shower time which is between 19:30 and 20:30.
Before going to bed I made use of the toilets which were quite a shock, luckily there are western toilets not the conventional chinese hole in the floor style toilets. However there are 3 toilets right next to each other with separating walls that are barley 1.5m high. To make things worse there was a rather unpleasant and pungent smell that resembles something like ammonia, not from cleaning agents but rather from stale urine, I guess I won't be doing any reading on toilet like I used to.
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