Expo, ShanDong Province, Mid-Term Results

Dear friends & family,

It's been awhile so i have a lot to tell you guys. Actually, I don't really know where to start. I uploaded some pictures last week of both the expo and my trip to ShanDong province, maybe you already saw them. You'll see that the weather circumstances of the pictures somewhat differ from other pictures in the "expo" album. That's because some of them were taken in September, when it was around 35 degrees, others in November. As u can probably see, that day at the expo was freezing cold! We were outside the whole day so at the end of the day i couldn't feel my toes anymore through my allstars. Wasn't really dressed for the cold to be honest.

The expo was almost over, so as you probably would have guessed, it was the busiest time to to go. Luckily someone from my organization, China Study Abroad,  (it's the guy who's sitting on a sheep eating a stroopwafel in the Dutch pavillion) was able to get us VIP-passes and reservations for really popular pavillions. So where other people had to wait for 7 hours or more, we could just flash our card and walk through, which was pretty awesome ^^. That way we were able to see the China pavillion, the Saoudi-Arabia pavillion, the Germany pavillion and many more. To be honest, the Saoudi pavillion was the best. I couldn't take pictures inside, but what they did was really unbelievable. Their main attraction was a huge video room in the shape of a globe, where you would move through on one of those horizontal escalators. They showed footage about their country, so the globe shape was really cool. It really felt like standing on a flying carpet haha. And their roofview was also amazing. Unfortunately my camera's battery was almost dead by then, so all the pictures I took are too blurry :(

So, at the end of October, expo had ended and all the expo-commercials, expo-dollls (named shibo) and expo-songs dissapeared. Finally. I also had to stuy for my mid-terms, which weren't so hard as i had expected them to be. I studied at the tushuguan (library) a few days, but still couldn't remember the characters... But in the end my grades were ok (reading: 75%, listening: 87%, speaking: 90%), so now i know for sure that they don't expect that much from those crazy foreigners:p A lot of people had high grades though, so I think they're really just trying to keep the moral up, as for a lot of the classes only 1/3 of my classmates makes it to them.

Then my language partner, Jack, asked me if I wanted to go to his hometown with him for his friend's wedding. His hometown is in ShanDong province and the (slow) train took 10 hours to get there. To be honest, it wasn't my most comfortable travelling experience ever, especially because we had seats in the nighttime and beds in the daytime on the way back. But the trip itself was really cool. I got to see a lot of things you don't see in Shanghai. Some people like to call it Real China, but i'm not so sure about that. Which part of Shanghai is not real. Jack's family took really good care of me and the food was really an experience. Two dishes that stuck with me are lotusroots (which are really nice) with shredded dogmeat :( and turtlesoup  blugh. Not my favourites, but I loved a lot of the other food, they had very nice bread, which I can't find here and really nice spicy fish.  O! The black fish in the pictures: we ate that. It was weird.

The village was something else, it doesn't get more rural than that. There was a huge energie generator right next to it, but the air still felt fresh to me compared to Shanghai, although that might have just been the cold. Jack's family members mainly say two things to me: leng bu leng? and chi ba! which is are you cold? and eat!, and kept giving me more clothes haha. I came back with another hat and scarf and weird insoles for my shoes that are supposed to make my feet warmer.

Best experience of the trip: Jack's grandmother taking my hand after dinner and taking me to her house, where we had to walk across a courtyard filled with corn to her frontdoor. Her house was really tiny, no heating (none of the houses had heating by the way), one lightbulb hanging from the cealing, but she had a tv in the corner.

That's it for now. How are you guys doing? Enjoy the pictures :)

xxx Evelien