He woke up early at 0720 after a five hour short sleep and had breakfast with his friends. It was cold and raining. The food was cold. It looked weird, with sticky rice and other stuff. Being the usual fussy eater, he decided to just go with a self-pity meal.
The day was later followed with a pair session where he met his personal counterpart from China. Once again, communication was a barrier. He tried his best to speak and understand the questions asked by his new partner, Zhang Jiang. What made it difficult was the special accent and deep vocabulary that they had which made him a handicap. The local brought him around the school, showing him exhibitions of final year projects and arts that the students have done. They were eye-and-mouth-opening, especially the paper human sculpture of the David.
Lunch was yet again sticky rice with weird tasting vegetable and meat. The vegetables had some odd spces that burned in his mouth, he called it the “stink-bomb” sort of spice. Later after lunch, he attended a gallery visit about the Dalian Polytechnic University (DPU), and following it a welcoming ceremony. The whole ceremony felt really formal, which he presumed was their culture of doing things perfectly and as best as they could. Unfortunately it was held in Chinese, Jonathan then realized that if he doesn’t fine-tune himself to digest the Chinese language, he would not survive. The local students were extremely attentive, giving much respect to the speaker on stage, whereas embarrassingly, the other students were restlessly fidgety.
The rest of the evening was spent heading out to the city to do necessity shopping. It took a one hour bus ride which cost 一yi元yuan. During the journey, he witnessed terribly flooded roads, poor drainage systems in this country, he thought. The bus was really crowded and cramp, almost sardine like and the people pushed to nobody’s business just to get on and off. This, to Jonathan, is true culture. The(ir) way of life.
