Alright folks it's been a pretty long time since my last update, so I'll give you a fill-in on my progress.
Probably the most obvious change is that I'm now living in an apartment. This isn't my final destination however. Towards the end of January I will be moving into a different apartment. Why the apartment jumping? I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but when you buy a semester of accommodation at the International Students Dorm at Sichuan University, you get accommodation until the 16th of January. Exams fall between the 20th and 30th - in my case from the 25th to the 27th. If you're planning to keep on living inside the dorm, that's fine, you can just buy another semester or something and you're set. However, if you're planning to move out, like myself, then you're charged at the short-stay rate. For the shared-double room that I was in, the price increased from 20 kuai per night to 70 kuai per night. Seeing as I had no intention of paying an inflated rate, I had to find somewhere to go I just re-read my last post and saw that I'd said all this before. Whoops. I was *going* to be on a spare couch at a friend's place, until I discovered that another friend had an entire spare room in their apartment. Entire spare room. Oh yes, oh yes.
To keep the story short, they're being very generous and letting me stay for free. More annoyingly, they're even resisting efforts by me to buy them drinks/meals/etc. The only downside is that the bed in the room I've got... well, it has no bedsheets. So another friend has lent me a sleeping bag. I'd go out and simply buy some sheets, except that the girl currently staying in the apartment that I'll be moving into later will probably be wanting to sell me her sheets! Soooooo we'll just see what happens. For now I'm quite comfortable in a sleeping bag.
Okay, what else is happening. As I said, exams are fast approaching. I'm trying to keep up with studying but I'm not very good at it these days, it would seem. That's actually an upside to having my new temporary housemates - they're both much more organised, and by simply hanging out with them, I'm sort of piggy-backing on their study discussions. One of them is a classmate of mine, the other is a higher level.
Oh, which is another thing. It would seem we've lined up a Chinese housemate for the new place. So it'll be Gosia (Polish), Bruce (Chinese, I really should find out his Chinese name...) and myself. I've only met him once but he seems like a good guy. He's also a student at Chuanda, and is studying management... I believe.
It turns out I don't need to re-enrol at uni, just give them money. So I'm slowly building up the required cash to pay them off. On that point, yes, I've decided to spend another semester here at Sichuan Uni. Right now I think that for what I want in terms of freedom to travel, freedom to have friends visit, freedom to basically do what I want; it's the best option. That said, I'm still hoping to find work... I actually met a guy who's cheating the system. He was a student at Chuanda, but had a tutoring job with a family who owned a factory. He explained that he wanted a VISA to just exist, so to speak, and worked with them to set it up 'on paper' that he's working for them, when in reality he's just tutoring a few kids and that's it. Living a comfortable bachelor's life, studying Chinese at his own pace/will. I'm jealous as shit.
Writing all this, I'm finding certain hypocrisies within my thinking. On the one hand, I want to be free to study at my own pace, on the other hand, I mention that I'm pretty bad at motivating myself to study. Would it be different if I was outside the system? I like to think so. I believe so. Maybe within the 'system' I need to remind myself that I'm still here for me and any study I do is just for me. I'm sure this is all obvious to you guys, but it's easy to forget. At least for me.
What else can I say... I recently saw Avatar in 3D at a Chinese cinema. That was all well and good, the special effects quite mind blowing while the story was a little less impressive, but a good romp none-the-less. Probably enough can't be said about the special effects. I've just done some reading and wikipedia came up with the quote that, 'the film is composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action'. This is significant in that, I can't tell real from fake in the film. I'm mainly talking about environments here, not the obvious stuff like the vehicles and aliens. I was actually told today that Avatar is now banned in China, though it's been in the cinemas for a good period of time already. If true, I wonder why. I mean, why try and stop it once it's already a) been watched by just about everyone that was really interested in seeing it and b)in every single dvd store in China.
Whatever, there's still a lot to learn about China. I've taken awhile writing this so I'm going to leave it there. Other events that have occurred are a 24th birthday party that was a lot of fun, and... I don't know. I'll add to this post or the next one when/if I remember anything I missed. OH! The trip with the parents. Yeah, I'll try make time to do that real soon. Along with booking accomodation and travel tickets for a friend who's about to arrive to travel with me during the Spring Festival period. Ugh. Too much on right now.
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