News from Dalian

Another two weeks have already flown by and I have the feeling that time is passing very quickly. It's been a month since I landed here yesterday.

The second week at university was very short for me as I got sick on Tuesday night. I was still normal at university on Monday and Tuesday but I was bedridden until Saturday, so there's not much to report about that.

We only had one key for our apartment the whole time, so on Tuesday I went with Winnie (one of our contacts who even knows a few words in German like 'shit', 'drink', and 'what's up') to someone who made a copy of the key. The whole thing took place in a small garage on campus, and from the outside you wouldn't think that there's anything inside, but an older man and his wife have a small kiosk in there, and the man then manually made two copies of the key on the floor in 15 minutes for about 3.20 euros.

On Friday, unfortunately, I missed the campus tour and campus rally, as well as getting to know the study buddies and an evening party where everyone was together to celebrate Lea's birthday. But health always comes first. I was feeling better on Saturday and in the afternoon we threw a little surprise party for Lea. We had cake in our apartment, played Werewolf, and then went out together to eat dumplings.

On Sunday, we visited the Dalian Zoo, which is just so huge. We walked around for four hours and didn't even see everything. They had a lot of tigers and bears and various different monkeys, and also all sorts of other animals, but the animal care was sometimes terrible and the Chinese don't really have an awareness that animals are living beings. They would throw stones into the open enclosures of the bears and feed the animals even though you're not supposed to do that, among other things. I found the pandas and the red pandas super cute, but they were so lazy and just lying around and sleeping.

In the evening, we booked our flights and hostels for the Golden Week and also planned a second trip to Xi'an for a weekend at the end of October with the others from Germany who are here. I'm really excited to see more of China and I especially hope that there's a lot of nature in Hangzhou. You can already tell that we're living in the middle of a huge city and it's always loud and crowded, and the smells are still crazy. Even though it doesn't really bother me and I've already gotten used to it, I'm really looking forward to being in nature again.

This week, Wednesday was actually the highlight for me. We didn't have wifi in our apartment for almost a week and one of our keys got stuck outside in the door. It was Open House Day here the whole time when we were all out. These two problems were fortunately resolved on Wednesday! In the afternoon, we went to 'little Venice'. The Chinese have partly recreated Venice and it was so beautiful there, with small canals and motorized gondolas and pretty buildings that unfortunately are empty.

Some Chinese people wanted to take photos with us and we had a lot of fun there. In the little Venice, there was a German restaurant and we treated ourselves to spaetzle with mushroom cream sauce and schnitzel there and had a very tasty German meal in China in the replica Venice.

Afterwards, we walked along the harbor, sang old songs, and watched a water show. Various small water fountains were illuminated and performed a kind of choreography to the music, which was really cool!

Also, this week I briefly met my study buddy Sherry at university. She's a very sweet Chinese girl and is very friendly and helpful. Tomorrow, we're going on a city tour and a welcome party with the buddies and some people from the university.

Right now, I'm lying in bed and I'm so tired because we went out with a few people from Cologne who are here for the summer school for a few weeks, so we didn't get much sleep. We had noodles soup earlier (I love it, I think I've had noodle soup every day for the past few days and I'm slowly becoming a pro with chopsticks) but other than going out to eat, we didn't do much today.

By now, I actually feel like I've really settled in. I have university every day and I also have to do a lot for university at home, and otherwise we always do something with the flatmates or with the others. We're really a great group, things are going really well so far, and I'm super happy about that :)