Host family
When I went to China I only had gotten a welcome family that I would stay in until they found a new one. And on 21st of September I got a call from my old host sister telling me I was going to change host family on the 23rd of September - my birthday.
It was very bittersweet changing family since I liked the old host family a lot but I was so happy that they finally found a new host family for me!
The new family is great, it's my father, mother, my 2 years younger host sister and our beautiful dog, Tang tang! I live rather near to the school and in a great area around a lot of shops and close to the bus, my life here is great!
Old family: Host brother and grandmother
Old family: Sister and brother
Old family: Mom and dad
Old host family
Our beautiful dog, Tang Tang
Morning rutin
Every morning, all Chinese schools have their morning exercises.
It’s different from school to school, but everyone has it and similar to each other:
Our school are divided by which class you in and you have to run in together in a nice looking way, otherwise you have to do it all over again – once a class had to do it three times.
Then the teacher will tell you some things to do, like take a rest – STAND STRAIGHT. Look forward. And after the teacher is satisfied we will do two dances. One student is on the stage doing the dances and all the other student stands in front, no need to look at the student on the stage since they had a special training day before school start to learn the dances – me on the other hand, stand there and trying to go with the flow.
Chinanna is back on track!
Today and tomorrow we will have something called "Sports meeting" in our school and today the opening cermony took place. Me, Oming and two chinese students together sang "Rolling In The Deep" and it's one of the most fun things I have done! When we came to the first chorus a crowd of people ran towards us and gave me flowers, glitter strings and one class gave me a pair of angel wings haha! One boy took one of the flowers from my hand and threw them away to give me a new bouquet , it was crazy! I really get a lot attention here since I'm the only one in the school looking different.
The opening cermony had other performances and everyone did a great job, people were dancing and every class in grade one (高一) and grade 2 (高二) had made their own special performance - it was great to watch!
Grade one, class ten - my class!
Me looking like a christmas tree after the performance, and here they had taken away half of my stuff haha!
At school (again haha)
Still I don't have internet at home, only in school or at starbucks, so right now I can't upload any pictures...
Everything is great here, the school is taking really good care of me and today I need to go and fix my visa, my teacher is going to drive me there! They are so friendly here and I feel really welcome.
Today my exchange student friend Omid has his birthday, so were going to celebrate it in some way! As it look now I'm going away on a military camp with the school between the 16 - 22/23 September, I really hope it's the 22nd since the 23rd is my birthday!
再见！
My city
I live in Changzhou which is located in the southern part of the province Jiangsu. It's a small city with almost 5 million inhabitants. It's rather near to Nanjing and Shanghai which are to big cities in China.
My apartment is really high up and you can look out over a big part of the city even if the building is not located very near to the city center. The city center is big! There are a lot of KFC's and McDonald and also there are clothing shops like H&M and Chinese brands.
Then you can also shop clothes in the underground center called "FashionLady" - here there are stores you can bargain and buy cheaper thing, some bad quality and others good. The real expensive shops like Prada and Gucci are in an shopping center on top of the underground center.
I haven’t been around the whole city yet, but I really like it here. It’s big enough for me and there are a lot of fun things to do!
Host mothers birthday!
This week, my host mother had her birthday. We celebrated it with a lot of delicious food and cake. A cake which we ate at the same time as we ate the fish that was served for dinner, that’s how you do it in China. After we finished dinner I was so full and then they bring out more food, now we ate hot pot. It’s really good but very spicy! And now I ate duck blood and it was actually really tasty.
Cake - that red thing on the top is tomatoes!
FOOD
More food...
Duck blood !
学校
Sitting at Huang 老师 Office and waiting for Omid to come so we can meet the principal and then I'm going to meet my class! I'm really nervous and excited , most excited for that we have Internet at school!!!!!!!!!!!
Just hi
I written so much to post here on the blog, but since I never get internet I can't post anything!
I'm going to post it as soon as possible , tomorrow (1 september , a saturday) I start school, I'm really nervous...Soon I've been two weeks here in Changzhou and it has happened a lot of things: chinese valentines day, language lessons, gotten new friends and my hostmothers birthday! Now I'm going to go play biljard with my exchange student friend Cordelia and some chinese friends !
再见
At 星巴克
I don't have internet in my hostfamily's home so it's really hard for me to blog right now.
But today I will write a lot, but there's so much to tell you about! About how different everything is here, even the most normal things as going to the bathroom here is so different - i would say especially going to the bathroom. First of all, some toilets are just a hole in the ground, like every public bathroom is just holes. AND, you have to bring your own toilet paper since they most often don't have it at public toilets. BUT observe, do not flush down the paper in the toilet, put it in the bin beside the toilet, whatever business you've done.
Maybe that's why the toilets here are rather smelly and sometimes very gros, some people also leave the door open at the public bathrooms.
There's much to tell then just about the bathrooms, stay tuned!
A fresh public toilet
