Student life

A short update what my life is about last few weeks: for the first few weeks I still found it difficult to adjust to a student life, and to 'force' myself to always speak Chinese. In the first few weekends, it was just so much easier to hang out with the people you know & like and that actually spoke English with you (esp. after a week long intensive Chinese studies).

Two weeks ago, I just noticed that I still spoke quite a lot of English, so I tried to find some other ways to meet with Chinese students. It's not that you suddenly just go up to a person and say that you want to practice your Chinese with them ;-) So I went back to my old student life, and tried to think of how I met most of my friends (and they still are) when I was a student - student associations! What to do without them? I asked a local student to translate to me what kind of associations there were, and she asked them if I could join them.

So now, I have the best of both worlds, I don't speak/read Chinese well enough to be part of the organizing team, but they are extremely welcoming me in their associations being the first 'foreigner' to join their club. So they always just invite me for the 'fun' stuff :-) How good is that?
Also most of the students speak quite well English, but they are mostly too shy to actually speak English to me - so I'm speaking Chinese non stop at the moment and when I don't understand a word, they are able to say it in English to me ....

My first activity was last Wednesday with one of my association (volunteer group) to go to a anti-drug facility (?) Basically a place where they bring drug addicts to, to help them to quit. This could be forcefully or voluntarily, but once your inside you're def. locked up. ;-) Very interesting.

Second activity will be with my outdoor activities group (yes I actually joined two organizations ;-) - I thought I might as well ;-) ) basically they have outdoor activities every other weekend, so it's a great mix between speaking Chinese all day and actually doing something fun.

The only bad thing about joining these organizations is that the students all make me feel so ooooooollllldddddddd ;-) Most of the students are in first or second year (18-21 years), but then again, who cares, I'm learning Chinese while doing fun stuff :-)