Hi!

Now it has been a week when we arrived here in Guangzhou and unbelievable how fast the time has gone! Even in seven days we have already experienced a lot and I can't even imagine how much we can see and do during our three months stay. I start to write this blog by telling you little bit about our everyday life in here and all the possibilities that this University and its neighborhood offer us.

So, we're eight Finnish students in this student exchange program and everybody is very excited about our upcoming spring. We all live in University's campus area, which is by the way huge! I created a photo album of campus, so please take a look at it. Guangzhou University and its campus area are very new and absolutely awesome. It locates in an island and the whole are is very modern, clean and green, plantings are everywhere.
It has been few stormy days now, so we haven't been able to look around the city much, but the campus area ,University Town like the local tend to say, has become very familiar to us. Here are two villages of houses where you can rent an apartment by your own, tens of huge blocks of flats, Business Mega Center, two shopping malls, supermarkets, sport fields for basket ball, badminton and volley ball, dozens of restaurants, art center, science museum etc. And this all just to mention a few of them! Here are some examples of the prices in campus area services:

*Shopping clothes, shoes & accessories from 1€
*Hairdresser from 1 to 5€
*Eating in the restaurant from 0,50€
*Buying movies from 0,50€

So this campus area provides you everything you need in everyday life and it's a very safe choice to live in. All of us Finnish students live in a hotel kind of building. We have single and double bedrooms with toilets, shower rooms and balconies. Apartments are quite cold at the moment because of the surprisingly bad weather, but they are very clean and nice to live in. Hotel stuff is also very kind and helpful.

Yesterday we had our first lectures. We have 12 hours Chinese each week and 13 hours of culture, economic and commercial law studies. Our days start at 8:40 in the morning and end at 3 o'clock pm. Because we have very diverse courses, we also have many different teachers. So far everybody has turned out to be very professional. Our language teachers seem to be enthusiastic to teach us and I'm sure we are able to learn "survival Chinese" faster than I thought, thank you for the excellent teachers. This morning we started with Taijí-lesson. It was such an interesting experience and the teacher was also very good, I can't wait to learn more of it! I'm so glad that our studies consist of many different courses and give us a proper view of Chinese language, culture, economics and law.
This first week I'm giving myself time to adapt to this exotic environment and new way of studying. On weekend we're planning to go hiking to the mountains so after that adventure I will write you again! :)