Uni photos.

reading Leila's blog reminded me that although everyone always hears various tales of my year in China, no one's actually seen much of it. i've begun putting some videos up on myspace, but i dont think i really feature in any, as usually im doing the camera work. lol.

however, inspired my leila i shall start to blog some photos from china, so people can get a feel for what everything actually looked like. i shall start with the uni, in particular the dorm, our living quarters. pity or even us, hehe you, choose! (pity is more likely perhaps. haha)

first things first. following arrival in the uni the first place we moved into and explored was of course the dorms.

this is the dorm building, large, grey and ominous. at times looking and feeling like a prison, at times a place to run wild, play indoor cricket in the corridors and flee from russians weilding water guns. affectionately known as 'the su shi' (soo-cher), which of course just means 'dormitory'. lol

this is the courtyard in front of the dorms. the photo's from the entrance of the dorm reception. the courtyard was the best place to play in good weather or just sit and chat. days and evenings alike were spent here, bitching and gossiping, skipping (as in a giant skipping rope that went up 3 floors of the stairwell - yes, that's right we measured!), pretending we were russian or some other descent that doesnt speak english in order to avoid the 'hello! excuse me! my name is peter! u r very beautiful! i am want making friends to you! can i have your number? what is your name?', and playing aussie rules, or in my case, just watching.

the corridor outside our rooms, on level 5. you can tell we've only just moved in at this stage cos there's only 3 pairs of shoes outside my room, as opposed to the 30 or so lou and i had lining the entire wall in later months.

and now we shall enter the room itself.

lol this was clearly the first week, or first few days since nothing at all is decorated! yet it looks disgustingly messy! ah well.

here's the view towards the door, displaying our (bec as my roommate at this time) desks, wadrobes and then the entrance to the bathroom directly across the hall, which was both convenient and inconvenient in its proximity depending on the air currents.

here's a slightly more decorated my side of the room, just a bit before bec moved out and lou moved in. complete with leehom, jay chou and kwon song woo on the walls. i wish i had a photo of jestie's dorm room to show, the walls were collaged in posters, and we even suggested she do the ceiling too for when lying in bed in order to solve her dilemma of having no where else to put posters left. lol.
isnt it funny how u never remember yourself being fat, and yet the ugly evidence is there for all to see! how disgusting. and that is my mum sitting on the bed. they came for a visit in july, which was nice and drove me crazy playing tour guide/ translator almost 24/7. if u've never done it before, u'll find its a very very tiring, trying experience. i think everyone found that, if their relatives came for a visit.

it seems i dont have any other photos showing more of the room but i had well and truly decorated the walls and the ceilings with windchimes and snoopy wall clocks that kept falling down and smashing (oops!), posters and ink wall scroll paintings. it became even more bright and cheerful with the collection of Louise's mess and our assortment of shoes and boots. very nice and homely.

haha, just found i had this one lurking about in shame. this was my post holiday travelling mess. i very literally emptied my travelling bag onto the floor between my bed and my desk (the other mess covering my desk is due to my family arriving the day after my b'day and then me running off travelling to beijing with them). this was probably the morning after i arrived back home from my mid-year holiday, which means that lou would be in the process of moving all her stuff (which had taken up an entire double room) into one half of our room. it was a messy morning as u can guess.

remember the bathroom which was directly across the hall, (think i measured it one day, i believe it was 3 steps from my door to its door). tadaa!

this is the bathroom with often smelly toilets, 3 sinks, where only the middle one has hot water, provided its 'showering time', and the door opposite leads to a small clothes drying room, which was useless in winter because all the wet clothes literally froze into ice, as in solid ice, but in other seasons it was quite useful.

and entertaining, when the damn pole hanging all the clothes would decide to drop out of the roof and fall on your head, meaning everyone's clothes needed to be washed again, you supporting a pole on your head/ shoulders are feeling both suprised and a tad sore and you're left to call out 'help!' repetitively in the vain hope that some passer buy may come to your rescue, wielding a chair or two of course in order to put said pole back into its brackets in the ceiling. and after about 4months of complaining to reception about this issue they did finally but very reluctantly send the young handyman to put us out of our misery and fix it. thankyou mr. young shi fu!

what's next? ahh, the toilet. for anyone not familiar with toilets the other side of the world has, these are them. ohh, and the doors without locks, i'd forgotten those. every other set of toilets on every other floor all had working door locks, except ours!! did provide some fun and entertainment though when u'd hear the screams and cries of people who either a) walked in on someone by msitake, or b) were walked in on. haha. it was fun.

(p.s. i loved the christmas tree that was there when we arrived in march and as we actually edged towards christmas at the end of the year managed to disappear completely!).

despite being thoroughly cleaned every morning they liked to smell quite terrible from time to time. however, for everyone turning up their nose in distaste, many people find these toilets more convenient, comfortable and hygienic than our western public toilets. u dont have to touch any part of it! so much cleaner than a icky toilet seat which everyone's bum sits on! and no, fear not, i dont sit on public toilet seats.

i dont have any photos of our communal showers which were all the way down on level 1 (or ground floor), which is a good thing, considering their open nature. but on to other communal things we come to the kitchen.

it looks a lot nicer than it is. we only dared to cook there 2 or 3 times, cos it really was quite dirty and yukk. and the taps, sinks and cooking utensils were crap. and over all it was just dirty!

back to my dorm room and my window seat, ooh i dislike my very brown looking hair.

i never realised my hair was brown until i dyed it blonde. it is most definitely brown.

what did i see out that window? many things, i shall show you.

view number 1: the neighborhood of apartments in close proximity to the uni, it's divided by a steep wall. everyone please note the brightly coloured childrens play equipment in the bottom left hand corner. it had been removed about a week after our arrival and i swore to everyone that it had been there but i got the feeling no one seemed to believe me!

view number 2: the international cafeteria building (where the food was rumoured to be quite bad, i never really ventured to try it). never the less we had a nice view of their roof.

view number 3: the edge of the courtyard, and the snow covered basketball courts on the left, and athletics track and soccer field on the right.



moving onwards outside. this was our other favourite place to sit, usually at night, until they were mean and locked all the entrance doors. it's the roof of our dorm building.
and yes the retainer wall to stop us falling down 7 stories is only 30cm high. despite an increased heart beat due to my fear of heights, if i sat a bit further away from the edge than lou or bry then this was quite a good hang out spot. and yeah, night time was beautiful, the stars, the uni grounds. a good place to escape to. while it lasted....


moving back outside, close to the basketballs courts, on a sunny july day with pretty blue sky and wispy clouds, you can see the lovely grey buildings of the dorm on your right, which seem to merge into the classroom building for international students on your left.


and now for an inside tour, alongside my family. here is our classroom, door ajar on the right, bright windows on the left, and blackboard and teachers desk in the middle.


and here are our seats, with desks crammed to close together allowing absolutely no leg room.

and damn shelving under the desks which didnt match the height of the chairs so u actually couldnt put your legs under the desk. i often sat slightly sideways on my chair. i found it aided talking in class.

ooh, and this was the usual teachers' scrawl we had to deal with in order to copy down important notes into our workbooks. they had that annoying teacherish habit (which i found i too possessed) of writing over what they've already written and squeezing extra bits in where there clearly is no room. sorry about the slight blurriness. kind of hurts your eyes doesn't it? ohh, and anyone who adds a comment saying 'haha, it's all chinese to me!', be fore-warned... it will be deleted! lol


right around the other side of the uni to our dorms and classrooms was the lovely gardens between and outer fence of the uni and the rest of the campus. here was a nice little pond, waterfall and stepping stone rocks and you can kind of see the little pavillion set in the left corner.

luckily out of our view however, is what we named 'the tunnel of love' and love or acts of it is what appeared to occur under the not as private as passer-byers would have wished surrounds of a vine covered archway corridor on either side of the sweet pavilion where we liked to sit.

in broad daylight, and knowing they were in the view of others, as they could see us as well, im still of the opinion that said couples were rather odd exhibitionists. but it was quite funny to attempt to ignore them and carry on a normal conversation, still occasionally distracted by them from time to time like 'omg they've come up for air, what??! why is she eating yet another banana, isn't that the fourth? how many of those friggin phallic symbolic things does she have in that lunch bag??'

china would have you believe that western people are loose and immoral and doing all sorts of unspeakable things that china and chinese youths would never dream of but one stroll near the tunnel of love, where multiple couples would be there at once might i add, pretending there's a bit of privacy, is all it takes to vanquish that thought from your head.

even more amusing however was the game we played at the pavilion. consisted of me and lou sitting on a seat and chatting while bry hid behind a stone pillar in the fence separating the main road outside the uni from us. groups of passer byers or cyclists would then have the fright of their life as a crazy foreign girl jumped out from behind a pillar squealing 'blahh!!' the looks of horror, shock, confusion and suprise were priceless. we had some rules to our game though. the elderly and many women were off limits. didnt want to harm anyone.

but school kids, workers and youths were perfect. the catch of the whole thing was, if the passer-byers weren't intent on staring at me and lou in the first place then they wouldn't have got a shock. it was quite easy to see bry as they were approaching, but more often than not the silly people were having to much fun nudging each other and pointing out to look at the two foreigners sitting in the uni to notice. thus they brought it on themselves. it was a very comical relief from the staring you put up with everytime you step out of the dorm.

enough of that. final photo for today. this was the main uni road (i.e. inside the uni) and gardens closest to the outer fence of the uni. it leads to the main gate and the pavilion is located somewhere on your left at some point down the road. all of this is probably about 200m away from our dorm building, which is somewhere in the distance to your right.

and so ends the photo post of Liaoning Uni. sadly i dont have photos of the caf, recreation hall or other cool parts of the grounds. so you'll just have to continue imagining i guess.

we'll see if i think of something new to blog soon, otherwise we shall move on to my apartment photos. yay! love my apartment to death.