Pre-Golden Week

In China, holidays from higher education are not quite the same as in Britain. In England at University of Newcastle, terms go like this: Late September/very early October: begin Autumn Term. Late October is half-term/reading week for some lucky few (moi included!) and then we break up for Christmas around 17th December. Back to uni for January 9th-ish (Winter/Spring Term), normally we get a week and then it’s exam period until Semester 2 begins in February. Term breaks up for a month, give or take a day, around Easter (normally March 20th to April 20th) and then we begin the final term – Summer Term. Exams come in June usually, and then we have holiday from mid June until we’re back in September. It’s very organised and follows a pretty strict schedule. China, needless to say, seems a little less organised. Xinjiang Normal University, of course, has no modicum of schedule whatsoever.
Term 1 started in early September, and then Golden Week was upon us at the end of September. Golden Week is effectively half term and is arranged to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival. Officially there are only three days holiday for the festival, so the university moved the two other weekdays to the weekend (so we had lessons on the weekends instead of the following Thursday and Friday) – that way we got a whole week’s holiday. Mid-Autumn Festival celebrates the ascension of a woman into the moon with her rabbit… a little weird I guess. You traditionally eat mooncakes, which are like sweet pies of varying sizes stuffed with various fillings – some good and some vile.
I’ll cover the other term dates and so on when I get to them chronologically. Let me just say that we rarely know until the week of the holiday/return to classes/exam that anything is going to happen at all. Asking the staff members prior to the occasion in question is futile; they don’t know either. It’s all up to the powers that be. We weren’t entirely sure when we’d actually get off classes so we could go off on our planned Golden Week travels, but a few days before, we finally learned what was going on. It was too late by that point as we had already booked our long-distance train tickets and so we were forced to miss the newly scheduled weekend classes. Shame.
Catherine and I wanted to see some of the rest of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, besides its capital Urumqi where we live, at some point and in mid-September we went into our local bookstore (Xinhua International – there are all different types of Xinhua: educational, foreign language, international, normal and so on. The international is the biggest. Like Waterstones in Brum.) and checked out some maps and guidebooks. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long until we were approached by a few people who were very interested in our existence. We chatted with them for a while and they told us some interesting places to go. There were so many places and they were all so far away that it made sense to go on one long journey and travel to them in sequence instead of doing one at a time, and this is when our Golden Week travel plans began to form. However at this stage, there was a very good chance that Catherine was going to go to South Korea to see some friends instead, and so the plan was left in the air for a bit.
There was something else going on at this point which was casting stress and uncertainty over everything, and that was our trying to acquire residence permits. After registering at the university, every student has to take their documents over to the Public Security Bureau to get their passport stamped. This is so that we’re actually allowed to live here… you don’t do this, you get deported. Simple.
Pangpang took us to the Bureau after the fortnight of registration. He was actually ill and so had gone to hospital and been on a drip (more about Chinese healthcare at a later date) so he was pretty out of it. We got to the Bureau and while we were waiting to be seen, they shut early without warning, so though he’d bothered to come out to help us there had been no point after all. Back the next day by ourselves. The Bureau runs a lot like the Chinese banks: you go to a little machine and press a button for the service you need. The machine prints a little ticket with your number and counter number, and then you must wait for your number to be called. It reminds me of the deli counter at the supermarket! The main difference is that the Chinese don’t queue like the British. And fair play to them really; they know that if they don’t get an early number then they’ll be here for hours what with all the delays. People begin waiting up to an hour before the official opening time, and when it gets to about ten minutes before, they start to crowd up by the doors. The moment they open the door, dozens of people shove through them and charge to the single little machine. You’re pulled along with the crowd but good luck trying to press one of the buttons! If you do manage to elbow your way to the front and press the correct button, there’s a very good chance someone else will steal your printed ticket! Putting all our manners and inhibitions aside, we got our tickets.
It was on this day that I had damn bad food poisoning (well we thought it was food poisoning until Liam got it the week after!) and so there I was at the Public Security Bureau practically passed out on the plastic chairs. At our section of the office there weren’t many people that day, so I wasn’t taking up anybody’s seat. People kept coming up to me and telling me to go to hospital. Some horrible Russian man who was in fact just another customer came over and told me to sit up. I was tempted to vomit on his shoes; that’d shut him the hell up. Fortunately on this occasion we were not at the Bureau long. We handed over our documents and passports and then I went home to lie in bed with the bin next to my head; right where I belonged. We were told to come back next week to pick up our passports and so back we went.
On that second occasion, it was pure hell. This time Liam was the ill one, and the Bureau was crowded to breaking point with stressed-out foreign people. Liam went to wait outside where it was calmer and Catherine and I took turns queuing at the various counters. When it got to our number we went up to the correct counter and asked for our passports back. They told us to go to the counter next to it. We queue more. When we reached the front, we are told to fill in a form and go back to the original counter. Off we go, and at that counter we’re told there’s nothing they can do for us and we need to go to the counter down at the other end of the room. Finally we get there and I force my way to the front where I run into LiLi, a friendly Kazakh girl we’d met a couple of times. I waited about 45 minutes at this counter, until suddenly they asked me for money, which I realised we didn’t have enough of (as we weren’t aware we had to pay anything, not having been told, of course). So Liam and I went home and got enough money for the three of us and Catherine stayed at the Bureau to keep an eye on any developments. When we finally got back it looked pretty much like we were never going to get our passports. They had told me that they were in a different room, and so they had to send somebody to look for them and it would take a while. That was why I’d waited for 45 minutes. But these passports never materialised. We proceeded to go to various counters trying to track down our passports, or at the very least a clue as to what was going on/a useful person. Needless to say, none of the three could be found. Eventually we were told to come back the following week. Ah. Slight problem, for a lot of people. The date we were told to come back was just before Golden Week, and practically every foreign student wanted to go travelling. To travel in China, you need your passport; otherwise you can’t stay in any hotels. To travel outside of China, you obviously need your passport to cross the border, but also to book plane tickets you need to give them your passport details, which the average person can’t call to mind voluntarily. So Catherine was in no position to book tickets to South Korea – the flights are very expensive and she can’t get full refunds so if she even managed to book a flight without her passport details, if she hadn’t got it back in time she’d not be able to enter the country. So all her plans were scuppered by the incompetence of the Public Security Bureau.
Catherine had not been 100% decided on going to South Korea anyway, and so the other plan we had was for the three of us to go travelling to all these places we’d learnt about in the bookshop. But we were in a bit of a pickle there too – no passport = no hotel.
So that was the state of play just before we went: one of chaos, as per usual, and us not knowing what to do next. We went to see Anniwar in our desperation and he rang the Bureau for us and discovered that actually, they were lying to us about when we could get our passports – we thought we’d get them just before Golden Week (20th September) but apparently we’d be unlikely to get them until October. After Golden Week. He told us he’d try to use his connections to get them to us faster. The next day, with no sign of any progress, Catherine marched into the International Office and demanded a student card. Student cards were yet another hassle involved in the whole registration process – in fact even now in January there are still lots of students without them. They’d been umming and aahing about them and said we had to wait for everybody in our Lower Intermediate level to complete registration before we could have them. Students were still turning up to begin registration as September was drawing to a close, and we knew how long registration took so we despaired of ever getting our student cards. However, when Catherine got angry, she got her own way. She said she wouldn’t leave the office until they gave her a student card, and they handed it over within 10 minutes. The cards are not actually cards but little books with all our details and then lots of stuff written in Uyghur and Chinese. Unfortunately I don't think we get to keep them. : ( The next day Liam and I went in and used the same tactics to get our own cards. They looked like they might refuse until we told them that our friend had already got hers so it must be possible. Tobin didn’t get his card until very recently, despite going to the office practically on a daily basis to nag, and believes that we were only given ours because we are exchange students with Newcastle and therefore Anniwar wants to groom our recommendation. He’s very likely right. We thought (after consulting with Anniwar) perhaps we could use the student cards like replacement passports, so we could travel in Xinjiang after all and not waste our holiday.
One day during recreation of class that week, my phone started to ring and it was Anniwar. He told me to come up to the eighth floor and when I got there, he happily handed over our passports – early, no less. He’d sent staff members to the Bureau on several occasions and with their combined effort they had finally managed to procure our documents with a completed permanent residence permit stamp. Hallelujah!
It was too late for Catherine to go to South Korea so we decided we’d all travel round Xinjiang together. Catherine and I planned the route for the week’s trip, and then we went to some seedy little office in the middle of nowhere to buy train tickets for the first leg of the journey. Just before we bought the tickets, we got a text message from our friend Frankie, also from Newcastle Uni, who was studying in Shanghai. She was coming to visit us in Urumqi, and had booked train tickets from Shanghai all the way out west. Erm… sorry, Frankie. We won’t be in Urumqi. Fancy coming travelling with us instead? Yep! So we were buying train tickets for four of us instead of the original three.
Later that week Catherine, Liam and I went to the south of the city to see Erdaoqiao. Catherine had already seen this part of town because she’d been to the university down there. The south of the city is incredibly Uyghur; in fact it’s a surprise to ever see Han Chinese down there. The main CBD is called Erdaoqiao. I absolutely love it now, but on the first occasion we went there it was horrible. I swear I wasn’t imagining it, but it seemed like everyone there was staring at us with more than the usual hostility – more with a desire to slit our pasty Western throats. The staring at the university had already considerably lessened, and so this staring really hit me for six. Liam felt the same, and we were both really paranoid about being mugged as we’d heard so many stories about mugging and pickpocketing in Erdaoqiao. Catherine was absolutely oblivious to all this hostility, but Liam and I felt intensely uncomfortable. Now I’ve been to Erdaoqiao several times and never once felt this way about it; I like it more than the Han parts of town and the Uyghurs all seem so friendly and nice. I can’t think what happened the first time I went! Maybe it was all in my mind, perhaps I was subconsciously intolerant; I don’t know. Anyway, the deep south of Xinjiang, like the south of Urumqi, is really Uyghur; and that was exactly where we going. Liam and I were suddenly not so keen to go on our travels.
The day before we started off on our trip, Frankie arrived after a two-day train journey on a sleeper. Also, Catherine’s friend William, originally from Hong Kong but studying in Almaty in Kazakhstan, came to visit with his friend and fellow Almaty University student Kim Minseon, from South Korea. We all went out as a group and enjoyed our last night in Urumqi at one of the many vibrant night markets. The next morning, furnished with my passport, some information about the south of Xinjiang and a not very keen desire to actually go, I set off with the others on our travels.

We went up to the top of the hill in the park at the end of our road. That is the view of Urumqi in the background, and the green buildings is the complex where I live. Everyone China-posing: l-r: Minseon, Liam, Catherine, William, Frankie.

At the same Sichuan restaurant where the photo a few posts ago was taken. Minseon and Liam are standing; William, Catherine and Frankie seated. You'll notice I am cleverly not in any of these photos.

Damn, I'm in this one. This is me at the night market.

And this, *ahem* artistically blurred photo is me eating Uyghur ice cream at the night market: Heaven.

General life in Urumqi 1

Well I guess it’s high time I tell you what life is like in Urumqi. It’s a bit hard to do this properly – because I am such an idiot and didn’t write my blog as it was all happening, I have now developed certain opinions, had certain experiences, and follow a certain routine, which is different to what I was doing when I first got here. So everything will be retrospectively affected. Never mind, I’ll do my best. I’ll try to just do life as we knew it up to Golden Week at the end of September, seeing as that’ll be my next big topic, and then tell you how it’s moved on on another occasion.
Hmm, where to start? I should probably start with telling you about the people I know here, as most of what I spend my time doing is with them. Firstly are my flatmates, obviously. Liam and Catherine. I didn’t really know Catherine at all before we got here, but she’s really nice and funny so we all get on well and have a very happy flat together. Rachel is obviously not living with us, but she is the other University of Newcastle connection. I have mentioned Tobin and Tracey, the Scottish couple, who are studying Chinese. There was also an American couple who live two floors above us in the apartment complex, Eric and Michele, but sadly Michele was only here temporarily so has returned to the States. Eric’s still here studying Uyghur language. There’s another American called Paul learning Uyghur. He was originally learning Chinese at our university but has now moved to the Agriculture University so he can concentrate on just Uyghur, as his Chinese is already pretty good. Nolan from California is an English language teacher at our university. There’s also Jonny, an English teacher from New Zealand, who I believe teaches at the Agriculture University. This is our little group of Westerners. Added to this group there’s various Chinese, Uyghur, Mongolian and other American people that we meet from week to week. For a while, there was Ivan, a Kazakh who was acting as Eric’s German tutor, plus his girlfriend Angelikà. They’ve pretty much disappeared now – we think they’ve gone back to Kazakhstan. Not the widest circle of friends, but there’s few opportunities here to meet genuine friends (as opposed to the Chinese type of friend: they come up to you and say “let’s be friends!” just because you’re white. And from then on, you’re expected to teach them English. So we have come to look on people we meet very suspiciously these days, as we expect them to just be looking to use us for English practice. Catherine is very good at picking out genuine friends from the bunch and has therefore found herself lots more friends than me and Liam. Guess maybe we’re just too cynical eh.).
So what do we all do together? Eating out is a favourite. Food here is very cheap and so we can afford to eat out pretty much whenever we fancy. More recently we’ve come to realise we could perhaps do with spending a little less on food, as it seems to be eating up our kuai pretty fast, but in the first couple of months we used to eat out for lunch with Tracey and Tobin after most of our morning classes. Occasionally bigger groups of us would go out for dinner too. We also liked a coffee bar called Eversun. It serves quite nice food, which it claims is Western. It’s not especially Western really but it comes as close as we’re likely to get! It’s very expensive and to be honest it’s not my sort of thing, but back then we’d go there from time to time.
Another favourite is going out on the night – of course! Our most frequented bar is fubar, a bar run by an Irish guy, a Japanese guy, and a Kiwi. The crowd there are almost always Westerners – fubar get into all the travel guides and so there is a constant flow of travellers through, plus the constant regulars. This is the place we went, and still go to, to socialise and get a bit of Western joy. I also tried shisha here for the first time – apple flavour, very nummy but also made my breathing extremely strained, so I guess I’ll be keeping my pathetically asthmatic self away from that from now on. Before we went travelling in Golden Week, we’d only found one club, which is a Uyghur club. It’s brilliant. We used to go a lot more regularly; in fact we haven’t been for weeks and weeks now. You have to be quite willing to just let yourself go and get into the Uyghur dancing, which is danced in a very particular way. The men basically stick their arms out in front of them in a sort of frame, and then bounce their shoulders whilst spinning around or rocking backwards and forwards. The women get leeway for a bit more creativity: spinning as well, but also lots of swirly hand gestures and head movements. The club is not like any Western club I’ve ever been to – there are armed security guards dotted around the dance floor and acting as doormen, and there are live performances. After every song, the dancefloor is cleared, and then the next song begins and everyone goes back on again! As this defies all common logic, we decided to stay on the dancefloor and see if we could change the run of things, but we summarily removed by a guard with a gun.
We were warned by Tracey, who’d lived in other parts of China before, that people would approach us for English practice, but until the day she told us this, nobody had ever come up to us. But on that very day, lo and behold! We got our first request! The Chinese can be very forward about this, and like I said, just march up and say “let’s be friends! Give me your phone number.” We’ve learnt now how to turn people down but when it first happened we just made loads of excuses about having just got there and so not having a phone. Not that that stopped them; they asked for our address instead.
Before Golden Week, we’d only been in Urumqi for a month and were still settling into the scheme of things. There’s a lot to do and see in Urumqi but actually at this point we’d experienced very little of it. We stuck to the places we knew and the people we’d already met and let our friends discover all the new places! Not very pioneering, but there you go. There’s not much else I can say then. I suppose one interesting thing happened to us, and that was being invited to the National Day Reception for Foreign Experts.
I say we were invited, but that was not, in fact, the case. Good old Anniwar told Rachel that there was a convention and banquet that we were all invited to, and could she tell us to turn up on campus at a certain time so they could bus us to the posh hotel where it was to be held. Smart dress needed as well. On the day, Catherine decided not to go, but Liam and I gamely put on the smartest clothes we had in China (me: dark jeans, fitted black top (with a some-time broken zip). Liam: jeans, T-shirt) and went over to campus, where we discovered Paul and Nolan were also coming, and dressed in suits and ties. Uh-oh. I’m not sure if it was then or later that we noticed our stupid Chinese washing machine had put a hole in Liam’s top. Oops. Rachel turned up with a lovely colourful outfit and bright green hair, so we felt less out of place then. Finally Anniwar turned up, took one look at us, and called Rachel over to have a private word. She came back and said: “guys, I’m so sorry, he’s saying you weren’t invited, that it was just me. But I swear he told me to tell you to turn up!” She told him that he had told her this, and now she had caused her classmates to turn up but with nowhere to go! To which he responded: “the government has cut them off. Make excuses to them.” To this day, we’re not entirely sure what that means.
As there were so many people, two mini-buses were needed and as Paul was waiting for his landlady to turn up, he and Rachel waited behind. She worked in the office with Anniwar and her husband was some kind of official and so she had wangled him an invite. We were still hanging around chatting when she arrived; deciding what to do with our evening now that the government had so meanly cut us off, and she told us to come anyway. So we did.
Paul, Liam and I were stuck in a table at the back, but we still got to see all the presentations, which were pretty dull. Then we enjoyed a huge feast of traditional Chinese food. Since coming to Urumqi my tolerance to spice has grown considerably, so when Paul dared me to eat a tiny weeny green chilli, it seemed like a fun thing to do. Cue lack of breathing and feeling of faintness. As my vision started to blur I swore I’d never do that again.
What was most exciting about the convention (to us, anyway) was the HUGE number of foreigners there. I have never seen so many white people in one room in my life! Well, in China, anyway. And all dressed so smartly, too. Actually, we ran into Phil (from Nuneaton!!!), Jonny the Kiwi’s friend, who we’d met a week or two back, and he was wearing an old blue Adidas tracksuit so we felt much better about our clothes. Posed for lots of photos with Anniwar and various important people – why they were actually important was lost on me, but apparently they were. I didn’t realise there were so many foreigners in Xinjiang, and I still don’t know where they’re all hiding.
So that was the last big event before we went off on our travels. As I said, by this point we’d only been in Urumqi for less than a month, so not so much to say about life as it was back then!





This is a group shot of us eating out at a Sichuan restaurant in early September. Standing l-r: Liam, Me, Nolan. Sitting, l-r: Tobin, Catherine, Eric, Michele, Tracey

Another group shot, out eating traditional Uyghur food as a big group for the first time, l-r: Paul, Tracey, Tobin, Liam, Rachel, Jonny

Liam and me at Eversun. Don't be fooled by how nice our deserts look... they don't taste how you might expect. Liam had ordered the American-style chocolate moose [sic] so we were doing a moose impression. Though we've since realised this is the official deer/extraterrestrial rabbit impression, not moose.

The convention - look at all the Westerners! (Not that any of you will care, you can see them every day by just walking down the street. (Again, not that they are animals that you look at as if in a zoo... I believe China may have corrupted my mind.))

One of the official photo thingies we had to pose for. I don't know who everyone is, but far left standing back row is Paul, then a Korean girl who I believe goes to our university, green hair is Rachel, next to Rachel is Liam, then a Japanese man, then me, then Nolan, then an American girl, then two Xinjiang Shifan Daxue staff members. Then the two on the right seated are two random Americans (the man may actually be British, I'm not sure), to the left of them are two more staff members, and then finally on the far left may I introduce... Anniwar.

Class Begins

We started our Chinese classes on Wednesday. Whilst registering, we met the only two other British people in Urumqi (or so it seemed!): a Scottish couple called Tracey and Tobin. Tracey is ridiculously good at Chinese and so is in a much higher class, but Tobin is at our level and so is in our class. There are in fact only four levels: beginner, lower intermediate (us), higher intermediate, and advanced (Tracey). Classes had actually begun on Tuesday, but we’d missed them because of the medical. After the medical we ran into Tobin on campus, and he told us that the classes were really hard. Comprehension, he said, was not so bad, but he told us that the reading classes were virtually incomprehensible. So we were ready for the classes when we came to begin them the next day.
The first class we experienced was speaking/listening, and I was shocked to discover that my Chinese was awful. I got the general gist, but the details were washing right over my head. Proper Heathrow Job. Half the time I just simply didn’t know what was going on. But Tobin had warned us and none of us British students seemed able to cope, so I wasn’t overly worried. The next day we got to experience comprehension and reading. The comprehension class was quite a lift; the teacher spoke very clearly and seemed to actually understand how to teach, unlike our listening teacher of the day before. That made us feel a lot more confident, but we still knew we had a long way to go. As Tobin said, reading was incomprehensible and all of us came away feeling very disheartened and stupid. The texts were just too hard for our level.
Our comprehension teacher, Teacher Zhang, is the Banjuren (personal tutor) for the intermediate level, and with the help of Tracey we explained to her that we couldn’t cope with the level of the reading class. She spoke to the head of the department and they organised an exam to test our level. I missed the exam because I was ill, as per usual, but from what I hear it was a bit of a joke. It was designed for a beginner’s level only, and everyone else in the exam basically just cheated anyway. However after that they agreed to change our book and so we got a slightly easier reading book. It took a pretty huge fight to get them to change our listening book, but finally they changed that too. The comprehension book was already at a perfect level.
One issue we had with the classes up to the half term holiday, known as Golden Week, at the end of October, was that we were in a class with absolutely loads of Kazakhs. Let me just say that I have nothing against Kazakhs in particular, and also that it wasn’t just Kazakhs (though they are the majority), it was also Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz. There were also three Koreans in our class, us five British people, and two Russians. The Kazakhs seem like fun-loving people! However, in a class environment, their desire for fun gets a little tedious. Not to sound like a huge geek or anything, but we are here to learn, and learning is a little difficult when the person next to you is on their phone, the pair in front of you are deep in conversation, the person directly behind you is playing music, whilst the 12 year old kid next to them is shouting across the room and throwing pens at his 13 year old friend. I struggle enough with my listening skills as it is without having to deal with all that. Added to that, our teachers seem to think it is perfectly acceptable that the students act like this, and on the few occasions that they bother to say anything, they don’t seem too fussed that their requests are completely ignored. Lots of the students are clearly too young to be at university, and none of them seem to have ever experienced discipline in a classroom environment. Tobin on occasion politely asked them to be quiet, which tended to be met with both amusement and also complete bemusement at being asked something so simple as to not be noisy so the rest of us could concentrate. It made our classes really quite pointless, as we spent every minute of every lesson wanting to kill our fellow students and quite incapable of learning anything. As far as the British are concerned, keeping the students in line is the teacher’s job, not the other students’. But then again, as far as the average student in higher education is concerned, being such an idiot class is immature and really not the done thing. We’re not in Year 7 any more guys… grow up.

Registration (continued...)

Catherine was nowhere to be found. We found her university email address on the system and tried to get in touch. On Saturday, we got a return email from her saying that she was at the guest house of the university. But Anniwar said she still hadn’t turned up, and that to stay in the guest house she’d have needed his express permission. We spent the weekend on a quest to find Catherine, with absolutely no success. On our mission we bumped into my (very briefly) former room-mate, and her Chinese friend. I told her that I’d moved out and that we were looking for Catherine, and so the four of us searched together. Sadly I just cannot remember their names, even after all their generous help. Bad Nikki. I still see her from time to time and say hello, but it seems a bit rude to ask her what her name is again now.
Finally on the Monday Catherine turned up. It turned out she’d got to Urumqi airport, jumped in a taxi, and asked for Xinjiang University. Which is an entirely different university, in the far south of the city. From what Catherine tells us, the university actually sounds more like the real deal than our university (Xinjiang Normal). The university had no record of her existence, but let her stay in the guest house anyway. From our emails Catherine had realised something was not right and had finally come to the right campus! We told her there was a room waiting for her if she wanted, and so she moved in with us straight away. Lucky girl never had to deal with the dorms!
Well now the four of us Newcastle students had to go for our medical. I may now have HIV… there was no sense of hygiene there at all! First we queued in a giant queue to be given forms to fill in, then we queued again to hand them back in and get a number, which was the number for another queue to pay in (322¥), and then finally off we trot to be examined. I had my blood sample taken by a doctor whose hands were covered with the fresh blood of the man before me, and plenty of other dried blood too. We were given a cotton bud to stop the bleeding, and the floor all around me had bloody cotton buds all over it. Then the doctor handed me a cup and said go fill it with urine. Okay, where? Toilets over there, he says. And then take it over to that room down the corridor. So there I am in a filthy squat toilet (as per usual, sanitary towels and faeces everywhere) with open skin on my arm, trying to pee into a tiny plastic cup. For some reason it took me ages to get the knack of sunken toilets – now I have no idea how I couldn’t do it – it’s so easy! But then I was still in the taking one trouser leg off, holding it off the floor and balancing stage, then pulling the trouser leg back on. Not easy with an open-topped cup of urine, y’know. But I did it without any spillages (yay!), and then carried my pee down the corridor to a room basically just full of people’s cups of urine. Lots of samples all red with blood too – lovely.
Then I got an ultra-sound from the most evil woman in the history of time. She shouted at me for handing her my forms the wrong way round (as in upside-down. Perspective, woman! Does it really matter?!), for god’s sake. Next I got an ECG in a room (where you have to uncover yourself) which was just covered by a short curtain. I’m not fussy about uncovering my body especially, but I was rather surprised to look over to the curtain and see the next woman in line, a little old Uyghur woman, with her head actually under the curtain, craning to see me! Ah well, no harm done.
Medical out the way, we just had to hand over all the other forms. Four copies of everything, they say. That included several pages of our passports, and lots of forms which seemed to have very little meaning, but had to be done anyway. Also copies of our landlady’s ID and license to rent, and a temporary residence form.
Four copies, you say? Okay, we’ll copy this document three times and give you those three photocopies, plus the original – that makes four, right? Not to the Chinese. They mean four photocopies, plus the original. That makes five. No wait, you meant six copies? No, sorry, seven? Hang on, you meant eight! Well why didn’t you just say? Oh, did we fill that in wrong (because you offered us no practical help whatsoever, might I add)? Well it’s been photocopied seven times and I refuse to go back and get them done again! The guy in the photocopy shop already hates us! I guess I’ll have to Tippex them all out then eh. Fun fun fun.
Whilst Tippexing out my mistake, I managed to spill a ridiculous amount of correction fluid all over the fourth floor office floor. And it was quick-drying. So there I am on my hands and knees, scraping dried Tippex off the floor with a staple, watched by some very amused Kazakhs. How embarrassing.
Our landlady took us off to get temporary residence permits, which was quite a hassle (of course) but eventually got done and so we were good to go. I am compressing all this so it sounds like it happened in a day, but in fact registering at the university took about two weeks. We were quite stressed by how long it was taking because we were on student visas, which meant we had to apply for permanent residence permits within 30 days of our arrival into China, and we couldn’t apply until we were registered students of an educational institution. But we eventually got it done in the nick of time. Rachel actually got taken into a police station because she didn’t have a temporary residence permit, basically because nobody had let her know how to get one. That got sorted in the end though too.
And hey presto! Finally we were registered, and living in our own apartment, ready to start life in China.

Registering at the University

Registering at the university and moving in was the biggest hassle ever known to humankind, so prepare yourselves! This will be a pretty long post.
After our fun-filled first night in Urumqi, we checked out of the hotel and made our way to the university by jumping in a taxi and asking for 新疆师范大学 (Xinjiang Shifan Daxue/Xinjiang Normal University). (Take note of the university’s full name. It’s quite important…)
We were dropped off outside the gates of what looked like an attractive campus. Through the big gates, which are watched over by security guards on either side, is a long walkway. To the right are more paths, trees and what must have once been an artificial stream. The buildings are fairly non-outstanding – neither pretty nor run-down.
From this point we really didn’t have a clue where to go nor what to do next. We knew that the Department for Chinese Teaching, which could be a good place to start, was in the Main Teaching Building. However at the time, our Chinese being pathetic and abysmal, we didn’t know how to say ‘Main Teaching Building’ to ask someone, so we began walking down this path in search. Already we could perceive that every eye was turned to us. We thought our week in Beijing had set us up for stares, and to be honest we’d already started to enjoy the fact that we were looked on with curiosity everywhere we went. But here the stares were not curious stares, but hostile ones. Both the security guards and students alike seemed to take some offence at our presence. We foolishly had thought that students might be a little more open-minded to the existence of foreigners, but no.
So, under the duress of these hostile stares, we wandered around looking for some clue as to what to do next. Ah-ha! A map! We crossed over the path to find ourselves looking at what was possibly the most useless map ever created. Yes, it was a map of the campus, which we discovered was bigger than it looked at first sight, but it was NOT LABELLED. (On a side note: this map, which I believe, perhaps erroneously, is now covered up with a poster about the university’s cheerleading squad (do not be fooled by the fact that the university has a cheerleading squad into believing that it is a real, functioning university, because quite frankly, it’s not.) has almost never had labels. I say almost never, because for a brief while, about a month ago, they suddenly and without warning presented us with a labelled map, spotted by my classmates. When I say a brief while, I mean a REALLY brief while (read: 2 hours). I know this because, two hours later, when I excitedly went to look at these fantastic labels, they were no longer there. Why? Just… why???).
After perusing the map we settled on a building which looked like it could be the Main Teaching Building and made our way there. Through the main gates, walk on a little way and turn right, and then on your left looms a rather huge building, which was, in fact, the Main Teaching Building! Liam and Nikki – 1 : 新疆师范大学’ s Ruin-Nikki-and-Liam’s-Lives crack-team – nil. Sadly the crack-team were – and still are – worthy opponents, and by the end of the week the score was more like Nikki and Liam – 3 : Evil crack-team – 234698456099. Unfortunate.
To get to the door of the building, you walk up either a slope or some steps. As we were on the slope we suddenly spot 2 real white people. In our egotistical Anglo-centric way, we march up to them and in English say: “Hi! Do you know where registration is, by any chance?” We were met with a blank stare. They turn to each other and start babbling in what is unmistakably Russian. “Registraaaaaski?” One of them asks us. (Yes I realise that that is not really Russian, but I can’t be bothered to put it into Cyrillic. In fact, it may not even be the Russian word for registration. But I think that’s what she said.) Yup, yup, registraaaaaski please. They turn and point at the building we are just about to enter. That is a Good Sign.
We know the ‘Department’ (department my ass) for Chinese Teaching is on the fourth floor, so we go to this floor and are met with… chaos. Pure and simple. (Okay well pure and simple is exactly what it was NOT – but you get my nub.) The ‘Department’ is basically two offices, which were at the time crowded with both staff and a LOT of Russian-speaking people. We stood in a polite British way outside the office, waiting patiently for our turn. Sadly nobody else seemed to care that things would work faster if we used a system of turn-taking, so our wait was futile. Suddenly a rather fat man came rushing out of the office and said in Chinese “Are you from Newcastle University? We’ve been waiting for you ALL WEEK!” (This man, by the way, is really quite sweet and is called PangPang by both us and his colleagues. Pang means fat… which means his nickname is FatFat. Apparently if you duplicate the word it gets a more positive connotation. But still..!) It was Friday 31st August. As I said in my last post, we had been told we were only allowed to turn up on the 31st of August and so that’s what we did! They told us they had sent people to the airport to look for us during the week and that we could’ve turned up any time we wanted. So we got to spend a very expensive and irritating night in that horrible hotel for absolutely no good reason.
Immediately we were sent, with an apparently bilingual Chinese girl who may or may not have worked for the office and who looked rather like a potato (I’d be less offensive to her if she had actually helped us in ANY way), to the eighth floor office: Anniwar’s Kingdom.
Let me introduce Anniwar. He is the Dean for International Students, and he’s a rather funny fellow. He’s probably in his mid-sixties, and is a Uyghur man who speaks Uyghur, Chinese and English having spent his year abroad at UCL back in the day. For this reason he thinks he ‘understands’ us. He’s generally friendly – sometimes overly so. He takes great delight in tapping all the girls on the bum when they leave his office. Though he claims to be fluent in English sometimes he clearly doesn’t have a clue what we’ve just said, and he seems to take particular delight in avoiding answering the questions we’ve actually asked him, instead responding to something else entirely. Possibly the voice in his head. Getting a straight answer out of him is like climbing Mount Everest, and most of what we’ve learnt from him we’ve come to in a very roundabout manner. And once he’s started talking – good luck shutting him up!
So there we were on the eighth floor International Student Office, meeting Anniwar. We were absolutely delighted and I must say extremely relieved to find someone who spoke English, as it was rapidly becoming clear that our Chinese was simply not up to scratch. Anniwar was very concerned that there were only two of us, and wanted to know if we knew the whereabouts of Rachel and Catherine, the two other students from our university. However we weren’t in contact with Rachel and didn’t actually know how to get in touch with Catherine. Besides, we knew they were intending to turn up by themselves and that they had had the same information as us regarding when they should register, so we weren’t concerned. We chatted a bit with Anniwar, and then he instructed the potato-looking girl, who had been hanging around, to take us to the dorms. At this point he actually told us that if we felt they weren’t suitable, we could turn them down and find our own accommodation, like the majority of their foreign students (and 100% of their Western students!) but that he’d rather we stayed on the campus as it would be ‘better for our Chinese’. Foolishly we didn’t read anything into this at this point and so reassured him that we felt dorm rooms would be ideal.
Potato Girl, as she will now forever be known, took us on a fabulous wild goose chase around campus. To this day we are not sure entirely what she was looking for. Not the dorm rooms, that’s for sure. Eventually she told us that the school’s computer systems were down and so we wouldn’t be able to pay our deposits, but as soon as they were back up and running we would have to pay immediately. Pas de problème. Then she took us to the dorms.
Ah, the dorms. God-awful place. Male and female are in different blocks. The international students are fortunate to share only 2 to a room. Post-graduate share 4 to a room, under-graduate share 8 to a room.
First we went to the women’s block. Potato Girl registered me as a student staying in the accommodation at the little reception inside the door. There was a little confusion over me having not paid the deposit, but eventually they accepted me and handed me over a receipt. Potato Girl asked me if I minded what nationality of student I roomed with, but I didn’t especially care. She then told me and Liam to wait at the main door of the building and disappeared off round the corner, returning a few minutes later with another girl. My room-mate, who was Iranian, spoke English, and was absolutely lovely. Together, they took me to my dorm room.
The rooms are in fact the same for all students, be they post-grad, under-grad, or international, basically a grey box. The floor, walls and ceiling are all unfurnished concrete. Beds are steel-framed bunk beds, there are just more beds in the rooms with more students. Each student gets a bunk bed, a tiny weeny square of a desk, a metal stool, and ‘storage space’ – a cupboard about 40cm by 30 by 30. And that is all. The bed has no real mattress; it is solid as a rock (being steel n all) and the so-called mattress is in fact a slip of barely padded (with straw, might I add) cotton. One thin ratty duvet and pillow. You are not allowed to stick anything to the wall. You have to get your own thermos if you want hot water, and you can have a plastic bowl which is used to wash yourselves, your crockery, and your clothes. Lights out at midnight, and you have to be in your dorm by 11pm when they lock the main door. The door of my dorm could be locked from the outside but on the inside it was held shut by a piece of string. My first reaction was one of horror, but I hadn’t seen the bathrooms yet.
As I said, there is no hot water provided. The first room of the bathrooms is a big room with two rows of sinks, with running cold water. The sinks are covered in scum and the tiled floor was awash with dirty water. I was informed that this is where I could wash my clothes if I wanted something bigger than the plastic bowl. The next room is the toilets themselves: about six sunken toilets with waste-paper baskets to throw everything unwanted into. Sadly the fact that there were bins seemed to have escaped some of the girls there, and like in the average female Chinese toilet there was used toilet paper strewn everywhere, sanitary towels lying about, and faeces lining the bowl of the toilet. I ask my room-mate: “Where are the showers?” The reply: “Showers? Oh, they’re on the other side of the campus.” Eh?
Liam had been waiting by the door of the building, and when I came back he could surely tell by the expression on my face that I was not impressed. However, I was trying to be cheery and accepting as I didn’t want to offend my room-mate and also I didn’t want to come across as a snobby Westerner who would just turn my nose up at anything and everything. And so I told Potato Girl that I would be fine with the room. She asked me if I was okay with my room-mate as well, when the girl was standing right in front of me! If I had had a problem, I could hardly have said!
I left my case in the room and then we went over to the male dorms. Up to this point, Liam had only had my word as to how horrible they were, but soon he got to see for himself! As a self-preservation measure, Liam and I decided we’d just spend all our time in each other’s dorms – but then we saw a notice which banned either sex from entering the opposite sex’s dorm block. (We’ve heard now that they get around this rule by climbing through the windows. Ingenious.) We figured we’d meet up in the library instead (again, I can say from the vantage point of four months down the line that that would never have worked out – we still don’t have library cards to enter the building, and in fact they’ve told us we can never borrow books in case we steal them. They’re so trusting.). Potato Girl showed us where we could get hot water to fill our thermoses, which was right next to the little shop, which in turn was next to the shower block (apparently. We’ve never yet been able to actually find these mysterious hidden showers.). We were then left to our own devices by Potato Girl and told to return to the office later on. We walked around the campus for a bit, at a loss as to what to do, and not wanting to ever enter the dorms again! Eventually we sat on the picnic benches outside the shop and mourned this turn of events. At this point I must admit it all got too much for me: I was sitting outside on a bench because I didn’t want to even go near the building that I was set to be living in, and all the time I was being constantly stared at by every passing student - and not in a nice way either. Added to that, I knew I’d have real trouble meeting up with Liam if we were banned from going in each other’s dorm blocks (not such a huge issue in the hot summer, but a real problem in the minus 25 degrees winter), and therefore I wouldn’t even be able to see my one sole friend in Urumqi. So I did what any sensible girl would do in the circumstances: I cried.
After pulling myself together, girding my loins n all that, Liam and I decided it was time for Plan B. We went to Anniwar and told him that the dorms were quite simply unacceptable. He told us to go away and think about it, and that if on Monday we still felt the same way then maybe we could move off campus. So off we went and discussed the matter. Our main problem was that if we did decide to move off campus, we had no idea how one would go about finding and renting an apartment in China, and so we knew we’d need Anniwar’s help. Even at this early stage of our relationship with Anniwar, we could tell getting his help would be a task and a half and also he clearly wanted us to stay on campus for whatever reason it was. But we also both knew that those dorms just wouldn’t cut it. How could we enjoy and appreciate our year abroad if we were unhappy the whole time because of the state of our living space? It’s hardly conducive to a good learning environment. Back to Anniwar we go, and this time he was a lot more co-operative. First he told us we couldn’t move out of the dorms as we’d paid a deposit for them and so should by rights live there. When we told him that actually we’d not been able to pay the deposit because of the computers, he said he knew of a brand new apartment being rented by a member of staff that we might be interested in, though it was very expensive in comparison to the dorms. No problema we say, as we’d still be spending a third of what we spend on student accommodation in the West, and we’d be getting what looked like (from the photos he showed us) a rather luxurious apartment. We were most excited about the fact that it had a very clean shiny white Western-style toilet. Result.
We immediately met up with the landlady, a Uyghur woman working as a secretary in the university, and she took us to the apartment. We were accompanied by Potato Girl who was still acting as translator. The apartment was amazing! Not that incredible compared to brand new apartments in England, but still better than my student house in Newcastle last year. There were three bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room, and an open-plan sink bit. Two rooms with two beds, one with three. We asked if she wanted seven people to live there, as we were only two, but she said no more than four. Not sure why. We didn’t know where Rachel and Catherine would be staying but the option was open for them now too.
We instantly paid a deposit and discussed the rent. We are renting for eleven months, but she wanted the entire amount paid by the end of the week. It sounded a bit dodgy but she explained that because it was a new apartment and she’d furnished it herself she was extremely out of pocket and needed money ASAP. The only way we could get her this money would be to take the maximum out of a cashpoint each day until the end of the next week, using two cards. Fortunately both Liam and I were in a position to do this. Even if we weren’t, I’m sure we’d have found a way, just to keep us out of those abysmal dorms. The price would be the same no matter how many people were staying there, so we knew that if Catherine and Rachel moved in, they could pay us back half the money we’d already handed over.
We went back to Anniwar and told him we were moving into the apartment. He didn’t seem happy about that, but by this point Rachel had also turned up and she had also refused to live in the dorms so he was aware it was not up to our standards! We ran into Rachel in his office, and she had also already paid a deposit to stay with another Uyghur woman and her son. Anniwar had told us we’d all have to make a pretty quick decision about where we were going to live because he’d have to keep a dorm room on hold for us until we did. But we wasted no time in getting the hell out of there! A good thing too, because the university normally has 100 international students, but this year they were over-subscribed for some reason and over 300 people had applied. The university would let in as many as they could (they have no real criteria/quota for class sizes and so on) but they all needed somewhere to live! So four extra students would get the Newcastle students’ places.
Back to the dorms we go, for the last time thankfully. My room-mate was not in, which saved me from an excruciatingly embarrassing situation: having to tell her that I was moving out just a few hours after I’d moved in. Liam’s room-mate, a Kazakh lad, was there though. He hadn’t been in before, so all he got to see of Liam was him come in, take his suitcase and leave, never to return!
So now we were installed in a brand spanking new apartment, and very happy about it too. We now had somewhere permanent, and nice, to live! But we still hadn’t registered. The fourth floor office (Department for Chinese Teaching) had given us some forms to fill in, as well as a list of what we’d have to hand over as soon as we got all the documents together. A few extras because we were living off campus, but it all seemed fairly straightforward at the time. So next, we had to deal with all this paperwork. And all in Chinese: obstacle number one. On that Friday, Potato Girl ‘helped’ us with the forms by filling them in wrong (thanks love) which meant that when we finally went to hand them over for the first time, we were told to go away and re-do them. Obstacle number two.
At this point we had nothing more to deal with until Monday morning, when we could begin the registration process in earnest. One of the requirements for registration was a medical, which we were going to have on Tuesday. The weekend passed quite well, and we began to see a little positivity in living in Urumqi. But where on earth was Catherine??



Not the best photo I've ever taken, but this is the main gate to our campus.



A-ha! I found the map! Pointless flippin thing.


This is a view of our campus. I took it in November so it has a bit of snow on it - not the sight that we were met with in the sweltering August heat! But there you go.



The main teaching building, where our classes are held.

We took so many photos of us in every room in our apartment. This is the one of me entering my new room (the one with three beds) in delight.