How much stranger does it get and what do they actually do with it afterwards? I am talking about the people who're taking pictures of us. I forgot to tell something about that yesterday and the madness continued today.

During the opening ceremony yesterday evening, we didn't want to attract too much attention so we stayed in the back of the crowd. Because I am taller than the average Chinese I didn't have any problems watching the performances. What I forgot to tell was that at a certain point someone like 'spotted' me and wanted to take a picture. This didn't go unnoticed for other people and in no-time there was a circle of people around me all wanted to take a photo with me. I don't know how many photos were taken there, but sometimes it was with one person, few people, or a whole group. I even lost Victoria and Roman in the crowd. After a while I saw them again and we decided to move to another place. I don't mind if someone is taking a photos with me, but with so many people around me and everyone wants to be on the photo, I felt rather uncomfortable.

About the same thing happened today as well. The police department came to our campus for some safety presentations. They had built stands all over the campus and were telling about safety on- and off-campus. One of the departments which was there was the Entry&Exit department, for aliens living in Jinan. Our international office asked if we could go to this stand and take some information about registration, safety and that sort of things.

When we got there and took some information, even the police officers were taking pictures of us and we were posing with them. We were also asked to stay a bit longer because the head of the Jinan police was coming to campus and it would be good if he sees that international students actually come to their stand.

Well, we were waiting there for a bit and then two busses arrived with some higher ranked police officers, press, cameramen and some other people. And then we this head of the police came to this stand it was just crazy. At least 20 photographers were taking photos, three cameramen were filming, lots of students and teachers were gathering around and we were just standing there and talking a bit with this officer and his wife. Talking about and uncomfortable situation…

So I very much wonder what all those people are going to do with our pictures. I can imagine that the press will use them somehow. But what about the police offers and all those teachers, or all the students that approach us every day? I am wondering what they're doing with their photos and to whom they're showing them.

Because of this we missed half of the first class and had only 45 min left. The teacher went quickly through the slides to actually give a 1.5 hour presentation in half the time. Then we had lunch, nothing interesting there, followed by the first Chinese class. This class was only half an hour because the teacher had a meeting. So we didn't really do anything in Chinese yet. So, it was an easy day for us at Qilu University of Technology.

In the evening I attended the English class for the first time, just to see how everything is going and what they are doing in class. For me that was to see if I would like to become an English teacher. Today I attended the intermediate class, so their English was already pretty good. As a comparison, the topic of today was 'Applying for a job'. It started with some vocabulary rehearsal and then a lecture about how to prepare yourself, what questions to ask, what questions to expect and so on. So that is about the level of the intermediate class, where the students are about 19-23 years old.

I think one difficult thing for me would sometimes be to understand some words. Every country, of course, has its own accent in the English language and the Chinese accent is sometimes very difficult to understand. But already after one week of living here it's getting a bit easier, so hopefully in a few weeks it wouldn't be that difficult anymore.