Today weekend started for me because this week my Chinese classes started. From now on I have to follow Chinese every Monday till Thursday evening from 18:00 till 20:35. On Monday and Thursday we have speaking and listening and on Tuesday we have characters (writing) and on Wednesday we have reading. Because I already followed Chinese classes last year it is now more easy for me. Because that is like 8 month ago I already forgot a lot so it is good for me to start over.

The teacher for speaking and listening is very nice. It's a young lady and she is very nice. Her English is also good enough to make everything clear and to understand us. The teacher for characters is middle age but she is not that nice. She already started the class in Chinese so we were telling her we can't speak Chinese but she just continued. She asked us some questions about what we knew. When she found out we really don't know anything she was pretty confused (what was wired because we are class 1 so beginning). She was also acting like we where stupid or something so not really a nice start. Her English is terrible so I think that will be a problem but we will see. For reading we have a young man. He explains everything very good and he also write down everything very big and clear on the blackboard so we can also see how to write Chinese. His English is also good so I actually think is this class I will learn the most off all. The teachers don't know from each other what they teach us so we got every time the same so we will see what will happen in the future.

In the teaching buildings they don't have air-conditioning so because it is very cold outside and raining a lot we are freezing in class. So everyone is hoping the weather will get better soon.

Anouk and I are the only Dutch in our class because the other Dutch students (3 in total) are all like Asian so they are following level 2 already. The rest in our class are 11 French student so maybe I also will learn French over her.

Yesterday and today we went shopping and found out that shanghai isn't that cheap as we thought. The prices are pretty the same as in Europe only you have a few exceptions. Today we went with 3 classmates of Anouk. They all three are Chinese so we could ask them a lot about here. When we asked about the prices they told us that Shanghai is the most expensive city in China so that is why. One girl had already traveled a lot and she also agreed with us that the Shanghai the shopping prices are not that different from Europe.

We had lunch with them in a restaurant that is specialized in spicy food and it tasted very nice. We had a lot of fish which was very good. Afterwards they showed us around in the shopping male where I was telling about before. Books like novels are very cheap over here if you compare it to Holland. Like 3 euro's is very normal for a book which normally will cost us like 20 or 30 euro.

Shopping for clothe is a little bit strange because if you try something on the salesperson will come to you and make the cloth fit right on you and if it doesn't fit they immediately take another size and try to give you some more clothe that you probably like. Its very strange that they are really dressing you. Today I bought a coat for the summer but it was full of wrinkles when I said I wanted to buy they immediately went to steam it. The people in the stores are really like making everything nice for you. It is nice they do that but also a little bit strange because we are not use to that.

For this weekend we don't really have plans. Only a little bit studying and tomorrow we will go out with the group of Dutch people I talked about earlier. So I think a quiet but good weekend.

Xx