It's Sunday evening, the 4-day weekend is about to be over and tomorrow I'll start my first full week of teaching. After panicking about the amount of hours for a few days, I've now decided to give it a go. I'm hoping that I can negotiate a different timetable for the next term, and maybe have some different groups. Until then, maybe I can somehow keep entertaining my PhD group, without them or me getting too bored or frustrated. Tomorrow afternoon I'll go with Mrs. Feng to see Mrs. Liu in the postgraduate office and we'll talk about it. By the sound of it, the plan is to keep the timetable as it is for the whole year, but let's see if my stubborn complaining will make them change the plan. Probably not.

The weekend has been really good, I'm glad I had this break to make the first week and my adaptation to the place a little easier. On Friday I went shopping with three of my students, Jenna, Alexis and Sophia, who helped me out in buying speakers for my computer and a couple of English-Chinese-English dictionaries (I’ve decided to seriously try to learn some Chinese…). We went by bike to one of the main shopping streets, which is only a few minutes’ ride from the university. I'm still quite enjoying the whole Chinese bike thing, there's something about being in a flow of hundreds of bikes, trying to dodge the ones riding on the wrong side of the road and every now and then making a rather suicidal attempt to cross the road or turn a corner. Apparently, stealing bikes is a favourite pastime of quite a few Chinese, which is why outside of every major shop there is a closed area for bikes, guarded by an old woman who will give you a ticket on your arrival and place another ticket with the same number in the basket of your bike. You can then later get your bike by presenting the ticket and paying the woman 2 jiao, which is 2/10 (1 euro being about 9 yuan). A great system, says I!

On Friday afternoon I went to see the university's sports' day at the sports stadium with Alan and his friends from the College of Foreign Languages. All in all a pretty boring do, but I guess worth checking out, as it only takes place once a year. After an afternoon of track & field competitions, we had to all stand in the middle of the field and listen to endless speeches and the results of all the events in Chinese… by the end of all this I was quite happy to go home to cook some noodles like a good little Chinese girl…

Saturday morning came round with the luxury of sleeping in until noon, after which I hopped on my bike and rode to Home Club, which is the nearest big supermarket from here. Later, I explored the city centre on my bike, and walking when my bum started to hurt too much (the bikes here aren't too bad, except for the seats… I can't imagine anyone doing long distances on these bikes!!). Baoding is quite a big city according to my standards (then again, what wouldn't be, coming from Palokka & Jyvaskyla…). The big shopping street nearby is full of shops of all kind, selling just about anything. The buildings lining the streets are covered in big banners and billboards featuring colourful adverts, even many of the beautiful old traditional Chinese style buildings in the centre have been converted into shops and covered with these billboards. The biggest difference to any European high street is definitely the amazing amount of people EVERYWHERE. This includes the thousands of people on their bikes and in their cars, as well as the street vendors of every kind, the random cool people loitering around looking…well…cool, pedestrians walking up and down and in and out of the shops, beggars trying to catch someone’s attention, the bike ladies handing out their worn pieces of cardboard, and so on. And of course this isn't just the high street, the same thing goes on right outside the gate of our residential compound.

Speaking of which, I live just up the street from the university, in a compound called the Ju Guang, which translates as candlelight. In Chinese, teachers are compared to candles as they spread out education like light (Finnish speakers: notice the comparison with the similar idea in Finnish, “kansankynttila”!!). So here we are, a majority of the university's teachers, packed into apartment buildings, some of which are completely new and spotless, while others look like they have been caught in several showers of acid rain. My building is somewhere in between, and I really have nothing to complain about, as my flat is huge and fairly clean. Of course the toilet stinks, but I've come to accept that as a part of the...ehhh…character of this country and added incense sticks on my shopping list.

On Saturday night, Griselle, the American teacher we have at the university asked me to go out for a drink with her and a couple from New Zealand, Fritha and Malcolm, who are teaching at the Baoding Teachers’ College, and have been here for about two months. So on our bikes again, to town, and after looking for a bar that someone had heard might exist, we headed for the one bar they knew for sure *does* exist. So this was Saturday night in Baoding, time to let my hair down, yeah! Of course there was nobody else in this “bar”, but I really enjoyed having a proper conversation which consisted of more than the “what's your favourite colour” or “Do you like Chinese food” type of questions. We even had a little booth all to ourselves, with closed doors and everything. The point of which kinda slipped me, as there were not other customers there anyway. Oh well, a bit of privacy is nice I guess, after all the millions of people looking at me in the street. A slight minus was the way kept playing the same tape over and over again with Celine Dion, Mariah Carey and the like, and the all time favourite song “I'm a big, big girl in a big, big world…” (Christine, you know what I'm talking about!) After hearing the aforementioned song for the 5th time, we decided it was time to head home, and made it back after 10, well in time for our curfew of 10:30 pm. Yes, indeed, we have a curfew, which is written down in the “rules for foreign teachers”. In any case, the gates of the compound are closed around midnight, I guess, so coming back after that would mean climbing the gates (which should not be too hard anyway...)

This morning , I met up with Alan and four girls who are fresher English students. We then took a bus across town and met up with another girl from Hebei University, and went to the biggest park in Baoding. The place was a combination of a park, an exercise ground, a theme park etc, with singing groups practicing their music, silly looking plastic pedal boats going around the little lake, old people doing taiji and exercising, kids riding on the merry-go-round, families having picnics and the six of us taking a full roll of film worth of photos posing in front of every possible bush and rock.

All in all, I'm beginning to feel more and more like I really AM here, for the first few days it all just seemed dream-like. But now, slowly it's beginning to feel like a real place and real life. Still, the fact that I don't speak any Chinese feels like a wall that separates me from the world around me, I walk in the street but somehow am outside of everything that happens. But tomorrow I'll have my first Chinese class with Griselle (who has actually been here for over a year and so knows a fair bit more to start with than I do) and Mrs. Feng as our teacher. With that, I'll try to break that wall down, brick by brick.