Being given an opportunity to be in this city is what I really wanted. Then I got accepted, then I bought the flight ticket then I got here and another type of life began. For a person who has faith in God, I found my life until now is a simply a great gift God gives, for every achievement and goal I made, for every true friend and enemy I met. Being in France before did me some changes in mind and of course it lead to how I behave. Let's say I adopted some French side inside me, brought it back with me to Indonesia and now when I'm in Chengdu.
I said to myself, if I can stand France, being practically alone in Europe, with their four seasons and me with all my summer wear, without any scholarship from my own country that until now I just too desperate to ask because I know it just won't give any result, with these two-three part time jobs with which I can survive, what can be worse in China? Where it is in the same Asia where I came from. Well.. turn out that I was completely wrong. China can be worse unless you're in Shanghai, Beijing or Hongkong.
People don't say sorry or thank you as often as you hear in France. That, I can understand, because it's just different way of manner here. People in car don't try to stop when they see someone tries to cross the street without red light, after about hundreds same situation I witnessed, I just try to understand that here, it's normal when cars don't let the pedestrian cross the street easily like in every other country.
Sometimes I go to the town with Simon, either eat in a restaurant, or simply visit the city. Then to go home, we want to take a cab. We stand at the border of the street waiting for a cab, then suddenly there's a girl/a man or a group of persons(it happens EVERY time) just stand in front of us, want to take a cab too. I mean, it's just not polite for a person to take over the cab from another person who waited before them, right?. We waited, and when the cab passed, yes they get into the cab carefree, without having second thought that we were there before. Apparently it's normal too.
For those who come from USA, Australia, UK, NZ, Canada n other English-speaking countries, it will give you a lot of opportunities for working with a big salary, because the employers mostly look for native speaker to teach English and without any accent. So even if you're from another county, speak English fluently but with an accent, they won't really wanna hire you. But in certain offer, they sometimes mention 'need white male' without hesitating.
Some American friends of mine here who have part time/full time jobs say that sometimes the offer on the site would be another whole different thing, they just found out during the interview or when they have signed the contract. So the tips, make sure the job you do is the same thing as the job description they write.
In the university, we have a football team representing the international program, where in this club they're foreign students participate. There are American, Korean n French students. Mostly the Korean students speak Chinese better than other foreign students. Bref, there were some matches with other university teams. Well until I write this note, I'm still angry with the f****n referee who weren't fair at all. The first match, almost all foreign students in the team have their football shoes with studs, but then the referee says "NO to shoes with studs because it's dangerous", the shoes with mini-studs only were allowed, and of course the other team already knew about this and they had all their shoes with mini-studs, while not our team. The field wasn't on grass, but it's sort of grains that you can slip easily with shoes without studs. Well it's ok, they didn't know about that, although I know some who intentionally bought a pair of shoes with studs for this match.
The other match, they didn't let players wear glasses, while in the previous games, they didn't tell anything about that. In our team, there were about 7 players wear glasses. I just found out that in the previous game, the other team had players with glasses, so they didn't mention it. Bas***ds. Angry enough for cursing. But hey, they just can't do anything about that. That time they just didn't explain why. They don't speak English too, how surprising. Same as other competitions our friends participated to. At first they were told that it was a sprint competition. They won. But after that, they were told to do some Chinese poem-reading competition that wasn't exist before. Well turn out they lost the game because they Chinese level just not enough to do poem-reading. Another basketball match, I went to support our team too, they were all American guys from our campus. The referee were fair enough that they won, but you know what happened after, a big fight between the other team who lost and the referee. It was just unbelievable. They were angry because they thought the referee was on the foreigners's side, but what he did was simply being a fair referee. One of them took the chair and just like to throw on the others. It was completely insane.
Well then... Not only those things above that happen while we're here, but those thing I just told, it's not really often told and it is true. I'm glad that I can spend some of my life here, a lot of lessons to learn. Chengdu is a really big and well-polluted city, but still you can find amusing things if you look for them. And hey, learn Chinese and you'll know what you can order in restaurants(since the menu is all written in Chinese characters). :D
BsxxxARS
BsxxxARS
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