The first month is done

We are already over a month here today. Everything is going smoothly and next week we have 7 days off because of Golden Week, which is the Chinese national holidays.
As announced earlier, we will go to Wuxi and I am very excited because there will be so many people that it's hard to imagine. At least, those are the warnings we have received so far.
During these holidays, the government also strengthens its fight against VPNs and blocks them, which limits our daily life here. Luckily, there is Skype, which at least works.

Not much has happened in the past 2 weeks. Thomas and I have already started our Chinese course and our teachers are doing a great job with a lot of enthusiasm. It's really fun, although I definitely have to do more follow-up work to make it more effective.

Besides that, I also meet with a Chinese person for language exchange and we managed to do it for the first time on Wednesday. He brought me some vocabulary, we practiced a bit and then we switched to German, but I was the only one speaking German and he mainly stuck to English. We mainly talked about current political topics and shared our perspectives. It was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to the next time.

In general, my daily life has been very busy in the past 2 weeks, so I haven't had time to write here. We had classes 4 days a week from 8am to 7pm with little breaks in between, and it's quite exhausting. Also, until Tuesday, I was still working on Digital Design and it drained the last bit of my nerves and energy until late at night. At least that's over now and hopefully everything will be passed in Germany.
Since next week is a holiday week, we also had a lecture today, on Sunday, which doesn't really contribute to relaxation either.

However, complaining is on a high level because despite all the stress, we went to Fusion to celebrate a birthday on Friday. Dimo and I left around 3am and took a tuk-tuk to Found 158. That's a kind of plaza below street level with many bars around it. After having two beers there and chatting with two French people, we went home. When we arrived back on campus, it was around 5am and the sun was slowly rising again. I am also responsible for being a bit tired during the day.

Furthermore, I am now the proud owner of a residence permit. It arrived on Thursday and marks the completion of the pile of bureaucracy we had to deal with here. It's also very liberating. And according to Lisa, the results of my physical examination are quite good. So now we can really get started here :)

written by: Friedemann