Xi'an know for being the culture capital of China will be our home for the coming 5 months. Here we will study at 西北工业大学 (Northwestern Polytechnical University / NPU)
During the last weeks I have kept in contact with the head of overseas students departments Mr. Wentao and was able to arrange pick-up from the airport.
The pick up would take us directly to the campus.
For the first time in my life I came out of baggage claim with a person holding up a sign with my name! I thought this was pretty cool.
The person with the sign turned out to be mister Du from the International Office, he would be responsible for us during our stay in Xi'an. If we have any trouble or need to get something done, he would be the guy we would have to go to. He arranged a van which took as from the airport to the old campus located just south west of Xi'an City wall.
The drive to the campus took around 40 minutes.
When we entered the Campus gate we were amazed it pretty much seemed like a small city. It was huge, after a few street turns we arrived at the international dormitory. Here the university had arranged rooms for us to life in during our internship.
By random choice Frank and I were matched up to stay in the same apartment. Stefan would share his apartment with a French male student. Our rooms were dusty so we decided to clean them first before unpacking. We heard from mister Du that a supermarket would be on the other side of the road called RenRenLe this is where we could buy some product to clean our rooms.
In the supermarket each isle had multiple employees trying to assists us in buying all kinds of different items. At one point we were surrounded by 8 employees all holding different wash detergent, while we tried to figure out which was best quality/price value.
After we cleaned our dorms and unpacked our stuff, we went to small restaurant on campus called TimesCafé to have some dinner. Here we learned about the word 没有 ( meiyou), everything we tried to order on the menu was "meiyou","meiyou" and "meiyou".
This was quite a shame since I was really looking forward to try a pizza. The thing they did have was some rice, with soy-sauce. It was quite dry, a bit of a let down.
The rest of the week we spend time visiting the international office to get our student cards, internet for the dormitory and talking to some other international students. On creation of my student card it turned out that someone else already had taken my student number so it took a bit longer than usual to get my card produced. This card is also a paying card for the school cafeterias and room facilities like water, electricity and internet. On Friday morning we met with our Chinese professor Yong Yang. He would be our supervisor for our internship periode. We had a nice talk about our stay in China so far, what to expect for our internship. He took us to our office on the 5th floor of one of the Aeronautic buildings. The room was labeled "Experimental Software Division" when we opened the door it was clear that the room was not used for a long time. Dust everywhere.
The professor explained cleaning the office is our own responsibility, the benefit would be that no one else will touch your work. This made sense and during the weekend we made sure to clean our office.
The setup is quite nice we all have our own desk with office chairs and dual core pcs to work on were provided. Overall an easy first week on NPU nothing much going on except settling down and explore the area a bit.
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