Julia's Blog

My first week of University went by really quickly and a lot has happened…

It started on Monday with a storm - there was heavy rain and wind outside and all schools were closed down. However the University was still opened. On Monday all the international students were welcomed by the CIE (College of International exchange) with a nice opening ceremony. The CIE is responsible for all exchange and language students and every year they have over 1000 students from all over the year. They teach the Chinese language in seven different levels and a level can have up to seven classes! After the opening ceremony there was a campus tour for all the new students and we got the see the very big and beautiful campus. Shenzhen University (SZU) is also known as “Garden-University”, which can be easily understood by seeing this picture:

On Tuesday the classes started. We have three different classes: Listening, Reading and Speaking. In the beginning we mainly focused on speaking. We learned to spell the Chinese alphabet and the pronunciation of the four tones (I will write about the Chinese language in detail another time). We repeated these things every day this week, but we also began to learn some easy conversations. We learned how to introduce your self and how to do some small talk… What I enjoyed the most was learning some Chinese characters. We already learned 24 characters and writing them is for me like drawing something.

My class is culturally very diverse - there are a lot of people from Russia and Eastern Europe, some from South America, two from North America and then there is me :)

Another exciting thing was, that I could move into my own room this week. Because of the electricity problem in the apartment, I moved in a temporary apartment on Monday. Shortly after we moved in, they told us that on Tuesday we could move in to the real rooms. So then on Tuesday we moved into our real rooms, which are just across the street. I really like my room and I enjoy having my own place!

I live in a shared apartment, which means that I have my own room but I share the public area (kitchen, bathroom and living room) with three other people. Right now, it is just me and another student from Italy here, but there have already been people visiting the other two rooms.

Since my University classes are only in the morning, I had some time to discover the city in the afternoon. Once I went to IKEA to get some stuff for my new room, another afternoon I had to go to the police station to register my residence and the other afternoons I just discovered the area here.

On Saturday and Sunday there are no classes at University. This weekend I joined Chen Ni and his family. We went to drink the best (and most stylish) coffee in Shenzhen at Beans in dance, went to the cinema to see the Spiderman movie and had some delicious Hong Kong food for dinner.

After dinner we went to continue the work on our pottery vases. We chose our colors and then painted the vases. This was harder than I initially thought, because you had to be careful that you distribute the color equally. You will see the finished result after they put it in the oven once again and I’m already curious how the finished vases will look!