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.
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