Hello NPU (The First Week)

After our Beijing adventures we finally arrived at the city of destination, Xi'an.
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.

5 Nights in Beijing - Day 1 (Arrival)

[12:40] Arrival at Beijing after a 10 hour flight.
I slept little on the plane, but with some movies provided by the in-flight entertainment it was quite durable. Although for the first 15 minutes I was afraid all movies were Chinese dubbed. It later turned out I just had to switch the channel.
Anyhow, we finally arrived and we decided we should just head to the hotel we booked. Stefan had made reservation at a hotel close to the old city and had printed the address in Chinese. Since we were not to sure on which bus to take and being a bit tired we decided to take a taxi to take us to the hotel. We got in line for the taxis and were appointed to a small fan which was old and crooked but did the job. The drive would take around 45 minutes and cost 480 yuan for 3 people. This is about 50 euros in total. Of course this later turned out to be quite the rip-off, but hey, first time in China not sure what the prices were. From our point of view this was still relatively cheap compared to back home.

During our ride to the hotel we got a quick introduction to the Chinese traffic rules, which basically state:
- use the clutch at all time
- on a 3 way lane drive with at least 4 cars next to each other
- the safety lane can be used to speed along the traffic
- use your big light when the person in front of you is not moving fast enough to your liking.
In other words complete chaos!
I personally thought it was quite a miracle we didn't get in any accidents, but it seemed we had a driver familiar with all these rules so we went amazingly fast.

We arrived at The Emperor Hotel, located just east from the Forbidden City. This is where we would stay during our 5 nights in Beijing.
During the wait for our check-in we all got a cup of tea and a wet hot rug to wash our hands and face. Quite nice after such a trip.
Taken to our rooms we were quite amazed with the style used in the rooms. The design really stood out especially the placement of the shower. This design inevitably caused this picture to be taken by Stefan.


After a quick shower we decided to explore the surrounding area. Walking up north, we started to understand that this place was not just a tourist place for internationals but also for the Chinese. Trust me there were a lot of them! After a nice walk we got a bit hungry and decided to just pick a restaurant and check it out.
Frank noticed one on our way he said it looked pretty decent. So we had a check and encountered a few internationals. We sat down and had a look at the menu.
I wanted to order something traditional, to get in the Chinese spirit.
I ordered a portion of dumpling, of course chopsticks were provided and we agreed to force ourself to learn to eat with it.
During dinner we heard the other internationals speak in Dutch, so we thought saying "hello" wouldn't be a bad idea. It turned out that they were students from the same city as us, Delft. I thought this was quite funny to meet people from the same city within 6 hours in an unfamiliar country and that just by chance. After dinner we headed back to our hotel. I had quite a jetlag from flying through 13 time zones within 48 hours so I went to bed at 20:00. To wake up the next morning feeling greatly refreshed.