Some other things while we're in Chengdu

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

Food in Chengdu

It's just been a while I don't post anything in this blog, although it's been almost 3 months I've been in Chengdu, Sichuan province, China for my exchange program. How time can fly so fast, that in less than a month I'll be returning to Indonesia, my home-country for my internship. Well then in this occasion, I'd like to share my experience about food in Chengdu. I live about ten-fifteen minutes from the campus of Sichuan Normal University. Near to the south gate of the campus, there are bunch of shops and restaurants, mostly Chinese and Sichuanese specialty for restaurants. Being a student here in China is really different than being a student in France, including this subject, food. When I was in France, it's really rare that people go eating in restaurants(except if they're bloody rich or simply a "bobo"), because it's very expensive. A two courses meal can cost you at least 28 euros (about 224 RMB). When I was in France, it was occasional that I go to restaurant, even thought I was working part time, but I preferred to cook my meal because it was far more cheaper. So when I did was like cooking almost everyday, having lunch at university canteen twice or thrice a week when I didn't have time to go home cooking due the afternoon classes, sometimes(rarely) buying for take away dish from a Chinese/Japanese restaurants and once a month or two going to restaurant with either my boyfriend or friends.

In Chengdu, people going to eat in restaurants is a very usual thing. For the general family style restaurants, every dish has a portion for two-three persons with a price starts from 12-50 RMB each. There are though some restaurants of noodles or fried rice for one person portion with a cheaper price like 7-12 RMB each. Around the south gate of my campus, I can find about two Korean restaurants. My Korean friends from campus always say that the foods aren't as delicious as the ones in Korea, but for me who has never been in Korea before, I can't even tell. And the foods in Korean style restaurants are quite delicious. They have of course Bibimbap, Kimchi as and Gimbap(which I always buy for lunch), with price between 8-15 RMB. In this area(just beside the south gate), we can find also this Taiwanese fried chicken small restaurant, just in front of the Korean restaurant. They're selling spicy fried chicken with bones or the ones without, spicy chicken meatball, and my favorite one, fried calamari with wasabi powder seasoning. The price range is between 8-12 RMB. The Chinese dumplings are also worth a try. There's a small restaurant of dumplings (Jiaozi) inside the campus area. For about 20 dumplings, you pay 7 RMB. Not expensive at all.

Sichuan province is very famous of their spicy foods. You really want to know how to say 'hot/spicy' or 'pepper'. The adjective for 'spicy' is 'la'(in Pinyin), usually in restaurants they will ask you 'lajiao' or not, then you can answer as you prefer : 'lajiao' means also 'spicy', if you don't want spicy, then you can say 'bu la' or 'bu lajiao'. The pepper in Sichuan called 'huajiao'. The very infamous Sichuanese dish is the Huoguo or the hotpot. It is a big recipient with a boiled sauce(spicy and not-spicy) of vegetables and meat. Generally if you see a restaurant with a big circle form hole in the middle, then it's a hotpot restaurant. The hotpot restaurants relatively are a bit more expensive because it is for more two person each table. Mostly the hotpot restaurant let the clients choose the vegetable or meat they want to put in a boiled sauce, and these vegetables and meats are presented in skewer form. If you want to eat hotpot but you're alone, you can try 'maocai', it's a hotpot for a one person portion. If you want beef with this 'maocai' you can ask for 'maocai niurou', with 'niu rou' means beef. The price is about 14-16 RMB already with rice. For a tea-coffee-sofdrink-juice drinker, Chengdu or China is a great place for it, because you can find almost everywhere a coffee-tea shop that serves also juice and other kind of beverages to take away. There's this coffee-tea shop called 'Coffee and Tea' just when you enter this area of restaurants, they have this strawberry ice milk tea (caomei naicha) which is super delicious, ask for 'bing de' which means 'cold' and for 6 RMB only, not even 1 euro(which is about 8 RMB). For coffee lovers like my boyfriend is, they have Macchiato (machito), ask for 're de' which means 'hot', and it's 10 RMB. They have also like a card that for every drink we buy, they'll put a point and for the 10th drink, you'll get one drink for free.

For sushi lover, they have some stalls that sell sort of sushi and maki, but they don't serve with soja sauce, but with mayonnaise instead, and be careful with the little sachet of wasabi you get from their stalls, it's pretty strong. In the town, you can find some interesting places to eat too, like the Korean BBQ restaurant for 60 RMB, you get the meat and some vegetables and you can do the BBQ yourselves, try if you have time. It's worth a visit.

There are not much of western restaurants though, well if there are ones, it's quite expensive, you can pay about 100 RMB for certain meal like burgers or steak. Restaurants like The Spot, Grandma's Kitchen, Bookworm, Peter's Tex-Mex are really known in town if you wanna eat from time to time western foods. Mcdonald and Pizza Hut take also delivery order in Chengdu, you just have to check their phone number and try to order when you get hungry late at night. Mcdonald has the English speaking service while Pizza Hut doesn't.

Maybe this is what I can write for a moment about Food in Chengdu. I'll update some more if I got other things to tell. Have a good day and see you next time, folks!

BsxxxARS

四川大地震 (The Great Earthquake of Sichuan)

One of significant damage to the apartment 

Okay... I'll start with a bit of story that has been told to me before arriving here, in Chengdu, Sichuan province. When we were asked which exchange partner university we want to be in, I chose Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu. There aren't many students wanna go there, because I heard that there was a big earthquake in Chengdu back in 2008. Point. I didn't hear about anything or ask about anything else. It was 2008, well in Indonesia, there is an earthquake several times almost each month in certain areas, I felt once in Bandung but it wasn't big. So then I said, "Well.. let's hope it won't be there when we're there."

Before yesterday I came home late from my friends's place and it was raining lightly when I went to bed at almost 3 am. In the morning I was awaken by a really big shaking on my bed, and I saw the curtain of my window shaking, also the door to the balcony. There are some building construction close to my apartment that every morning make a lot of noise followed by vibration on our apartment. For a minute I thought it was it, but then I said that this one isn't, it's surely way bigger. I went out of my apartment and saw some neighbors already ran to the stairs. For a second I saw the pool and it creeps me out when I saw the water made some medium wave due to the shaking. I ran down the stairs to the door of the building. It was stuck and can't be opened for almost a minute, but with the help of the neighbors we pushed hard and we succeeded to open this God damn door. A lady took a bike to hold the door opened. Then I was outside, waiting if there'll be the aftershocks, which is usually happened. Until today there are about hundreds aftershocks after the earthquake.

The door we stuck on

When I was outside, I saw a lot of people on the street, some in their cars and seemed like they wanted to go out of town. Big traffic on the road, and the small restaurants were full of crowd taking their breakfast. It was about 8.30 in the morning and since I got here, I never saw a lot of Chengdu people are out that early. When I got back to my apartment, I checked the news on internet, it was 7.0 of magnitude and the epicenter in a town called Ya An, still in the Sichuan province, about 100-ish km from Chengdu. They estimated the dead victims reached hundreds, thousand injured and that can still be increased. :(

The last big earthquake in Sichuan was in 2008, 8.0 magnitude and the estimation of dead victims was about 90.000 of people. The epicenter was back then about 80 km from Chengdu, and the dead victims in Chengdu city was about 80.000.
Hundreds to thousands aftershocks stated until two days after the first earthquake.

Traffic after the earthquake

Welcome to Chengdu

It's been almost a month and half I'm in Chengdu. It's one of biggest cities in China, located in the Sichuan province. I'm doing my exchange program for a semester in Sichuan Normal University in order to learn better my Mandarin lessons. Sichuan province is very famous for its spicy cuisine, for example for their Huo Guo or hotpot.

At first glance, Chengdu is full of pollution due to the building construction everywhere. Every local people I met always said that Chengdu is a promising city for an astonishing development in the future, maybe it can be another Shanghai in a few years. Chengdu is also very known to be the city where there are still pandas in the wild nature. At north part of Chengdu, there's a Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. Since their population is in a menace of the extinction, it is more and more encouraged to keep their existence preserved. Despite of the big population and the stronger its development gets, you wouldn't find foreigners as many as you can see in Shanghai. It is also not very frequent to meet local people who speak English. I had a little hard time finding my apartment and/or getting general information since I don't speak really well Mandarin.

For the transportation, Chengdu in full of public buses, subway and taxis. For buses, if you have the transportation card, you pay 1,80 CNY everytime you take it, and 2 CNY if you don't have the card. The card works for the subway too. The card costs for about 24 CNY and then you can charge it from 20 CNY. Chengdu for now only has two lines for its subway. The one which cross the west-east part of the city and another one from south to north. In every map of Chengdu, whether from the hostel or the tourist information center, all the streets and information are written in Chinese characters, so you better want to have sort of dictionary or Pleco application on your smartphone(Pleco is an apps that helps to recognize the Chinese characters or to translate). Not forgotten to mention, after a month and half, I never found a single bus route map, I started to think that they just don't have any(I'll update if turn out there's one). For cabs, in Chengdu there are these green color cabs that are more reliable than other ones. There are two types of green cabs, they really look similar but one has 8 CNY for their starting flag, and another one starts from 9 CNY. At night the starting flag rise up for 1 CNY more. The cabs drivers always speak Chinese, so if your Chinese isn't really good, just try to learn some sentences and pronounce the address really well, because it happened to me quite often that these drivers don't know the city very well so they have to ask their colleagues by phones.

Well, maybe that's all for the opening of my story in China. I'll try to keep it updated along the stay. Really hope to find more about this city, the province and the country.

BsxxxARS

On the way to the Great Wall Country

So the story is, me n my boyfriend got accepted to the exchange program at Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu, China. Both of us are students in Université de La Rochelle, taking master degree of Applied Foreign Language. Now is the first step of mine to get know how the life is in China. We took the lowcost company Air Asia to fly from Bandung to Chengdu on 4th March, right on my Dad's birthday. We paid about 120 euros each for a one way flight.

We first took 20 kg of bagage but then I realized that our stuffs were just abundant, so I contacted the Air Asia call center to make the change. This modification only can be done until 4hours before flight. The guy said first that to buy 15 kg of bagage would cost 225k IDR. But when I said OK to buy it, he said since I already 20kg of bagage, it is impossible to buy 15 kg with the price he told me before. But it is counted as an 'upgrade' of bagage quantity so I just have to pay the difference of the price. I said "Ok, and jow much is it?" He said that I have to pay 370k IDR. I said "How can it be that expensive?" He said that since I wanted to add 15 kg so in total I'd have 35 kg of bagage, it costs about 700k something, then I already paid half to the 20kg, so what I do is just pay the rest. I asked him if I can buy less, like 10 kg instead of 15kg. He said the minimum is 15kg. Well.. So 35kg it was.

Our flight was at 11.35 AM so we needed to be there 2 hours before which was at 9.30 AM. We got there, waiting a bit cause there was late 30min.
So now we're already at LCC Kuala Lumpur Int'l airport, waiting our next flight to Chengdu at 18.00 PM.

Ok, let's change some money to get some food. ;)

Visit to Bordeaux

Bordeaux,

Located in the region of Aquitaine, Bordeaux is indeed a famous city in the country where it’s placed and also in the regard of world for its wine. Since it’s just 2 hours from La Rochelle, I decided to go there when I have some time and then I went there for the holiday of La Toussaint (it’s the holiday for the Dead People). As I’m a member of Couchsurfing, I met once in Bandung a couchsurfer from Bordeaux who visited Indonesia. Her name is Natacha, she was with her brother whose name is Nicolas. After the trip, Nicolas continued working in China and Natacha went back to Bordeaux but we still kept contact until my retour to France. At the moment, Natacha can’t host me but she said that she’d find someone who can and there’s this Franc. Franc is not a couchsurfer but he hosted already some foreigners at his apartment, and this time, me.

I had a plan to do the covoiturage (it’s a system in France of getting a ride cheaper by car. Normally worked for someone who has car and doesn’t wanna pay too expensive for gas and highway, so they offer some place for people with the same destination but to share for the gas and highway- see the site : www.covoiturage.fr). Another way to get to Bordeaux is by train. The price depends actually of a lot of things. For example the age of the passager, the date, the member card, etc. Me, I have what’s called carte 12-25. It’s a card which we pay about 50 euros if we’re 12-25 years old to have a big discount for train tickets. Next year I’m gonna be 25, but I was just lucky because lately it’s the 30th anniversary of SNCF(the company which runs the trains in France), so they created the limited edition of carte 12-30 which can be used until I get 30. So now I have this card and usually this card offers almost 50% of discount from the price normal, and of course until I get 30. J cool, huh?

I checked first the train ticket and to get to Bordeaux, I’ll only pay about 14 euros. But the covoiturage offers 10 euros. So I contacted two different person with whom I’ll get the ride to Bordeaux and to return to La Rochelle after. But the morning on the D-day, the covoitureuse sent me an sms and said that she had a problem that made her not be able to go to Bordeaux that day. I quite pissed me off but I still can catch the train and arrived in Bordeaux at the same hour I told to Natacha. Once I arrived in Bordeaux, it was 6 pm already(I took the train at 4 pm). I went to the toilet in Gare Saint Jean (that’s the name of the train station in Bordeaux). I tell you guys now, you have to pay 0,50 cent to enter the toilet. For some it’s nothing, but if you can find another one which is free, better go there. :D

To reach Franc’s place, I need to take tram. Yes, there are trams in Bordeaux and unlike the normal trams, these trams are run by the rail and not by the electric cables on them. Bordeaux is the first city which does this system, though seems they will change it soon due to the high price they paid for it. But it’s impressive..

I bought the tram ticket at the train station for 1,40 euros and took the C tram on les Aubiers direction then I stopped at the stop Paul Doumer. That’s the second time I met Natacha but now it’s in France. It’s so funny. We both laughed while remembering the night we met in Bandung. She took me to Franc’s apartment because he went running with some friends from the sport club. After dropping my backpack, we went out for some apéro(aperitif). Natacha took me for a walk along the sidewalk of Garonne, the river which flows along the city. Then she showed me miroir d’eau(the water mirror) which is located in front of Place de la Bourse, the majestic  buildings with the monuments of three Goddesses at the front. The last time, the Goddesse wore the pink ribbons, because October is the month for the International Awareness of Breast Cancer. So this Water Mirror is actually a place in a square form which is filled with a two inched of water that can reflect the lights of the Palace de la Bourse at night. I saw also the Pont de Pierre(Pierre Bridge) which connects rive gauche(the left side of Garonne where the city center of Bordeaux is located) and rive droite (the right side of Garonne which is called Le quartier de la Bastide, the industrial area of Bordeaux but most of people don’t consider this area as a part of Bordeaux).

Natacha took me walking on the old street of Bordeaux where I can see a lot of restaurant, and including the asiatic ones. She told me this japanese resto called Fufu which is very famous and always crowded. We took apéro in the bar next to the Théâtre called bar The Regent. We ordered Lillet, a white wine for aperitif from Bordeaux (for the complete info, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillet ). It’s about 8 euros a glass.

I was really curious about this Fufu restaurant and wanna taste their foods. Then we went there, bought it and went home with. I met Franc finally. He’s a nice guy, open-minded and always nice to talk with. We talk about mostly everything that we can share like computer, culture or traveling. That night I posted in CS group of Bordeaux for a coffee the day after. In the morning I got a response from a Cser and then we changed number. I sent her message and we met at Quinconces where there were a lot of carnival rides such as ferris wheel, merry-go-round and jetcoaster. But then again I got a little bit lost until we met in front of La Place de Bourse again. This girl named Farah, she was just awesome. She took me sightseeing the city and explain the brief history at the same time. Bordeaux was once fenced by the great walls and there were some big gates to access the city center. One of them is called Porte de Cailhau. The walls are already crashed but they still keep the gates for the history.

There’s a street called Rue Sainte Catherine(St Catherine street) which is said to be the longest shopkeeper street in Europe with approximately 15 km. At the end of this street, there’s this La Place de la Victoire. We can find  here a monument dedicated for wine, only in Bordeaux and in front of this monument, there’s a statue of a big turtle and a little one aside. The turtle is also the symbole of wine itself. Like the grapes he bites in his mouth just like the grapes on Dyosnisos’s(the God of grapes in Greeks Mythology) head. Farah also showed me the traditional market at Place Saint Michel where found the very high tour which people can see from far. We went also to the famous Cathédrale Saint André, located at the Place of Pabelan. After that, we passed in front of Hôtel de Ville(if translated directly will be ‘Hotel of the City’) which is in fact the City Hall.

At the end of the day, I continue the sightseeing by myself because Farah had something to do. While waiting for Natacha to dine together, I went to see the Grosse Cloche(the Big Bell) which was created to warn if there’s a fire in the city.

The night we went to the restaurant at Place de la Victoire, called Auguste or usually called Chez Auguste. It’s very famous of its burger, but that night I ordered Steak tartar. I met Simon, a french guy, a couchsurfer whom I met when I did my trip to Bangkok last July. It was so funny that we met again here, in France. Then Natacha introduced me also Fabienne and Manu. It was really fun that night. I left this city the day after. I did my covoiturage with a french woman named Magalie. She was with her two daughters, and there’s another covoitureuse name Iba who’s originally from Lebanon(actually I don’t know exactly the spelling but that’s how it’s pronounced). We had a really good conversation and I’m looking forward to meet them again. 


I just had a great trip to Bordeaux.

BsxxxARS