Y'all acting like you never seen a white person before

---

I feel like I am in a big Chinese lesson. With mini Chinese lessons every morning at 8am. Everywhere I go I hear Chinese. It's not like England where there are so many different races and creeds walking about town. I still haven't seen ANYONE who isn't from the group I am with who is white, or black, or brown... Unsurprisingly we get a lot of weird looks wherever we go.

Had our first Chinese lesson today. I am in the top group! :O Lesson went pretty well, sort of brought together the basics that I knew and gave me confidence to actually start using it in the 'real world' which I am surrounded by atm! Our teacher said she won't be writing any pinyin from tomorrow ~ just characters! Scary! But I do need to start learning more characters.

This afternoon a man flew in especially from HK, Professor Kwok Siu Tong, to give us a lecture on 'Transformation of Chinese Traditional Cultural Resources in the age of Glocalisation'. This man is a legend! His academic career is impressive enough, with a fellowship to Harvard amongst many other things and he's also the vice-president of the United International College. But this is the thing... he actually trained Wing Chun Kung Fu with BRUCE LEE. NO LIE. In the 1960's. Everyone thought he was making a joke at first. I met a guy who's trained with Bruce Lee! OMG! haha

I managed to order a 'set meal' from a Chinese fast food restaurant place in town. I thought it would be fine at first: I just pointed at what I wanted and went 'I'd like to eat that' (in mandarin ofc), but then she launched into some massive chat with me, and I just stood there dumbfounded. Just because I can order something doesn't mean I can speak it! 😞

By the end of the day I was sick of being stared at and being such an outsider. I've never experienced anything like this. And I was getting too tired to speak Chinese, it takes such effort to speak because of the tones 😞 When I finally made it back to campus I realised that it already feels like my home in this alien city.

---

Photos

Lecture
Professor Kwok Siu Tong, good friend of Bruce Lee!

xiaolong
李小龙!