…14 hours flight is quite a pain in the ass! I was sitting next to Tania, she was nice and fortunately she didn’t talk a lot and didn’t stink. I would die if I had to sit next to a fat ass guy for 14 hours. I sat next to the window, it was good because I could enjoy the view, but I hate to bother people to go to the bathroom. The worst is that I had my period! I kept the window closed during most of the flight since I got to sleep/watch movies. When I decided to open the window…guess what I saw…the Verkhoyansk Mountains! They looked like a flat surface at first but of course they are gigantic. It looked like there were no end to this snowy and icy place. It was simply beautiful, I instantly thought…life is so beautiful and there is just so much to discover. I want to be everywhere and see what life has to offer!
An hour or two later, I saw China’s yellow earth. I was getting tired and my back hurted so much! I’m glad we finally arrived to Shanghai! We took the bus for another 2 hours to Hangzhou’s Zhejiang University Yuquan Campus. I met my roomate, mister William Daigle. I went straight to the bathroom and took a shower…ahhhh…I still remember how bad I wanted to shower. Then we went to the international students’ cafeteria to eat. When we arrived there, we didn’t even know how to order. I was with william and annie I think, I don’t even remember but we looked lost and "laowai". Then we saw two white guys laughing at us and guess what! They are from Concordia too, but arrived a day earlier, they are Raphael and Alex. We had a beer each. It was the big bottles of Tsing Dao…I read 10P of the label and I was like…danggg. But strangely, I didn’t even feel tipsy. Because guess what, it wasn’t 10 percent but something less than 3.6 percent! I still don't get what the P stands for, but whatever. Apparently, Chinese get drunk easily. Ok so after the dinner I went to the store with Raph to get a telephone card so I could tell my mom...I got to China safe and sound!.. but it was so complicated because we need 2 phone cards to make international calls, so the mission was unaccomplished. I went back to the dorm to pee and my roomate went for a walk. I was so tired that I felt asleep within 10 minutes!
(Building 31, Room 419)
The room's not bad right? There's even a balcony, a television and a queen size bed!
(may 5th, 2008): That day I got up at 7am. I thought, I don’t even need a clock or alarm to get up now that I am in China, but it’s probably jet lag. So that morning, me and william went out to eat since we did not like the food from the cafeteria. We walked on Xixi Lu but didn’t find anything since we don’t read chinese and didn’t want to risk our lives in suspicious places, but at least, we found a store to take passport photos for my roomate. Then we just walked around and discovered a few places like the gate to the mountain.
Me and Antoine decided to climb to the top. It only took something like 1 hour. The view was good, hangzhou is like a city built in the nature, it is something that montreal doesn’t have and that I really like. Everything is so beautiful and green.
Then we went to the orientation session and that guy explained everything pretty much. We then went to shop at a market near to our campus. I wanted to look for bikes, we didn’t find but I almost got killed a few times by bikes. My roomate was so tired that he went to sleep and he slept for 14 hours haha.
I only wrote about the first few days and I already wrote that much...seriously, I don't know how am I going to write about 2 months...so I will stop here for now. Hangzhou is very beautiful, especially the West Lake, but what makes a place attractive is its people I think. I still miss Hangzhou so much because of the people I met. I also loved the culture and I wish montreal was like that but that's just not possible. People are very kind. Westerners might say that they are noisy, dirty and all, but I think chinese people feel good in their own skin and they are simply the way they are, they are confident. They don't care whether they "look"/act weird or cool, that's how they are confortable with themselves and they actually care about each other, they make me feel home. The world is really upside down. Montrealers are too individualist and cold. The guys of montreal...Pffff seriously, I don't need to say how perverted and gay you guys are. Life was so different in China, I was just living my life the way I wanted it...I was happy. I didn't think a second of that stupid asshole, there's a lot more than useless shit like him. You see those are just little problems in life and once you step out of that bubble, you'll discover that there's more in life and you'd wonder why you were so stupid to not move on.
I met a girl and she said that she didn't want to go back to her country because she didn't want to go back to reality, which means to get a job and all. And I thought, does this mean that I am trying to escape the reality? I thought about it and the conclusion is no. Is what I am living not real? Do I have to go back to Canada, get my bachelor degree, be an accountant and get married? Is that "more" real? It's about how I choose to live my life and make what i like become real. I don't know if that's because I'm immature but that's really how I feel.