I got here on Sunday morning and by morning I mean at 2am, granted with jetlag it wasn't too bad. I got to the hotel around 3:45 am and then it was sort of a wild night. I went to plug something in my room but I guess they wired the hotels weird (they're kind of jank but "when in China" am I right?) and so my power blew out. I was pretty much wandering around my room blind for 3 minutes until I could find my phone and then go to the front desk to tell them about how my lights didn't work. The lady at the front desk barely spoke english and I don't speak any Chinese Mandarin so after a little while I was able to explain with hand motions what happened and she moved me to a different room for the night. So that night I got 2 hours of sleep because we had to go to church pretty early the next day. Church is pretty interesting in China. So because of the government, we aren't allowed to meet with the locals, so we went to an international ward, which means only people visiting or living in China with visas can attend. It's against the law for locals to attend our church services and it's illegal for us to attend their church services. We also aren't allowed to mention our church at all because that's considering proselyting, which is also against the law. Anyways, church was held inside a hotel because they don't have chapels here. There were maybe 70 people in the Guangzhou branch and 25 of those people were from my BYU group, so they are low in numbers. After church we went back to the hotels, we changed, and then went and walked around downtown Guangzhou. A couple of us took a ferry tour on the river and it was only 2 yuan, which is about 20 cents in US dollars, so it was pretty cheap. Guangzhou reminds me a little bit of home (Chicago). Chicago is still much larger, but Guangzhou has a river in the city similar to Chicago, and a lot of skyscrapers. Don't worry I still prefer Chicago to Guangzhou but I think a huge part of that is because the majority of people back home speak the same language as me hahaha. The language barrier is making things tough for me here, but I shall prevail. Since Sunday was our first day in China, my professors told us that we weren't allowed to go to sleep until 9pm in order to help us get over jetlag. And man oh man let me tell you, it was SO ROUGH. By 7pm I was already struggling, so at 8:45 I started prepping myself for sleep and right when it turned 9:00 I was in bed and I knocked out. Best sleep ever.
On Monday we started class! We live on the South campus of Sun Yat-Sen University but we have class in the east campus so we have to take a 30 minute bus ride to get there. So when we arrived we had the opportunity to meet the Chinese students that are doing this program with us and they're so cool!!! I learned today that SYSU has a 1% acceptance rate....isn't that crazy??? We got put into teams during class today for our projects and mine is seriously the best team. I'm so stoked to work with them and be friends with them. Afterwards we got lunch then we headed back to south campus. Today was a lot more lax than Sunday, I did some reading for class and then walked around Guangzhou with my friends Eric, Nick, and Jonny. Eric and Nick speak Chinese fluently so they're great when it comes to translating, and Jonny is the professor's son and he's been to China like 7 times (3 or 4 times were on this study abroad), so he knew cool places to go and stuff. Solid dudes.
One more thing. Everything is so cheap here because of the exchange rate from USD to Yuans. I can get a 1.5L water bottle for 4 yuan, which is about 58 cents. I can't even get a normal sized water bottle for that amount in America.
Also I'm posting a lot of pictures on all of my posts because China is rad.
how do you say "lit" in mandarin????
ReplyDeleteSeriously this is awesome though!!! Miss ya already!