Welcome to Wuhan

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Arriving in Wuhan marked the end of my transition from a big program where everything was scheduled and taken care of, to traveling with a friend who spoke Chinese better than I did, to being all alone! The plane got in very late at night, so I stayed in a hostel. The next morning, I made my way to the research institute to meet Shi Tou, the HR guy who would help me figure out my visa and get settled. For some reason, I thought the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics would be more well-known within the city. The people at the hostel helped me look up the address and gave me some directions for taking the public bus that I don't think I quite followed correctly. I didn't want to be late, so I flagged a cab and asked the driver if they knew where the research institute was. I said it is under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and it is near the East Lake, but other than that, I didn't know where it was. The driver nodded and said he knew, but actually he just dumped me at some random part of the large Chinese Academy of Sciences campus. So I hopped out and started asking random people how to get to the math/physics building. Maybe every hundred meters or so I asked someone new and they kept pointing me along my way. Eventually I met a graduate student who was also going in that direction, and he walked me over there. It was about a 20 minute walk. Tragically my Chinese was so bad I could not really hold a conversation with him.

Anyway, I got there, totally soaked with sweat. Wuhan is one of China's three furnaces, so during the summer it is often 90-100 degrees F and like 80% humidity. We grabbed lunch and headed to the passport office to ask about what the procedure would be, what kind of documentation we needed, etc. I had a 3-month student visa for the CLS program that was going to expire in a few days and I needed to extend it. As far as I can tell, these entry/exit requirements and procedures are not standardized in China at all. In Beijing, I went to the entry/exit office to ask for some information, but they wouldn't help me and just kept repeating that I had to go to Wuhan. I also thought that if you wanted to stay in China for a year, you needed to get a residence permit and an X visa (involves getting a physical). Also I thought my kind of student visa (F type) was for less than 6 months.

From the embassy website:
"Student Visa (X Visa)is issued to an alien who comes to China for study, advanced studies or intern practice for a period of more than six months. An alien who comes to China to study, short-term advanced studies or intern practice for a period of no more than six months shall apply for a (F) Visa."

Shi Tou has some friends who work at the visa office though, so when we got there, we totally jumped the line (others had taken numbers and were waiting around), and went to some special room upstairs where up to three people at a time discussed what to do with me. Man if it took several entry/exit officers together debating what to do, it is no wonder that I found unclear and contradictory information when I tried to figure this out myself!! Finally, they decided I could get another F visa for no more than 9 more months. So, I have to leave the country by early June, about a month earlier than I had wanted/anticipated. On the plus side, leaving this early meant that I could still change the return half of my round-trip plane ticket from CLS. Free trip home! (Except for the changing fees... thanks mom and dad.)

Before I came to Wuhan, my understanding was that they would provide me with student housing. Shi Tou showed me to my apartment and introduced me to Wu Nan, the postdoc who I am renting from. The confusing situation is as follows: The institute provides postdocs with housing (but I think also makes them pay for it?). Wu Nan has a ~1 year old kid, so she and her husband live with her mother-in-law, and her mother-in-law takes care of the kid while she is busy in the lab. Therefore, Wu Nan rents the place out, but still keeps some stuff in her bedroom and takes afternoon naps there. The place is nicely sized, with two bedrooms, a common room with a table, a kitchen and a bathroom. At the time, Wang Jie, an assistant professor of chemistry, lived in the other bedroom. So I was extremely confused when Shi Tou was talking about this room as Wu Nan's room. I was like "hmm where is my room?" And Wu Nan was like, "here, you can sleep on this bed." And I was like, "oh... but this is your room right? then where will you sleep..?" And Wu Nan was like, "yes it's my room, but I only sleep here in the afternoons." Took me a while to figure out what was going on.

Anyway, Wu Nan is super nice. She let me use her sheets until I bought my own. I also use her rice cooker and pans and hot plate. It would have been really expensive to buy all of that myself. I would say that people around here are more up for sharing, which is really nice. The flip side of that is that "my" room isn't really mine... it is Wu Nan's. Imagine if you had arrangements to move into MIT graduate housing at Sid Pac or something and they were like, "Here.. you can stay in so-and-so's room... the room is full of their stuff and there isn't any room in the dresser or on the shelves. You are lucky though, they only take naps in here!"

The next several days (weeks?) were awkward. I was basically on my own, because nobody introduced me to fellow students, and I had no idea where I should go or what I should be doing. At first, I didn't know where to eat, so I wandered in to some nearby restaurants. I could only find sit-down restaurants. Wuhan doesn't have as many foreigners as Beijing or Shanghai, and I almost never see foreigners around the Chinese Academy of Sciences. So people are usually very amused when a foreigner walks into their restaurant and they laugh and point and talk about you with their friends. People yelling "laowai" and staring and stuff happened before, but then I was always with friends. When you are eating by yourself, there's nothing to do but to stare at the floor and feel embarrassed that everyone is watching you eat. Eventually, they showed me where the cafeteria was, but that was kind of awkward too, because I didn't have any friends to eat with, and everyone was staring like, "what is she doing here?" I am still the only foreigner I have ever seen in that cafeteria, so people must have thought it strange.

After I finished with a few days of paperwork and other various logistics, I had been given no further instructions on how to start working in the lab. I asked Shi Tou how to start work. He said he didn't know and I should ask my officemate Liu Min. Liu Min said I should wait until Monday when Professor Zhan would be back. She gave me some papers and a book on atomic physics to read. Around that time, I met my roommate Wang Jie. He had been an exchange student at Yale for a few years during his Ph.D., so his English was pretty decent. Wang Jie and his officemate helped me get an overnight train ticket to Beijing so I could grab my stuff. I was especially missing my computer and internets!!!

I just spent the day in Beijing, because I realized that my passport was still in the visa office in Wuhan, so I wouldn't be able to stay in a hotel or hostel. I grabbed my two heavy suitcases of stuff (stored at Kayleigh's teacher's house) and took a cab to Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) and stashed my stuff in the international students dorm. Then I met up with Wu Jin, my host sister-ish person. She is my host mother's relative from Tibet who sometimes stays with her. She was mostly away, at school and stuff during the summer, so I did not see her often. Too bad, I think we would have hit it off if we got to spend more time together. We got lunch and had tea and she showed me pictures of her and her family in Tibet and then we wandered around the Olympic Park. Then I met up with Liu Shuo aka Louisa aka the best yuban (language partner) ever! We got food at Grandma's Kitchen, a western food restaurant chain, and chatted for a while. I miss my yuban!!! She was basically my favorite part of the CLS program.

Then I have no idea how I got my heavy crap onto the train, but I did. I took a soft sleeper because I had so much crap. A girl and her parents were in the same room as me. She was just starting at Wuhan University, so she had as much stuff as I did. Her parents were like, "we have three people to carry her stuff... how did you, just one person, carry yours?" I said that I didn't know. Back in Wuhan, we got off the train. At the exit to the station, people were waiting with luggage carts, like airport workers do in the airports in America. They seriously looked like train station employees! So I let them help me a bit and then they kept asking me where I was going and then it dawned on me that they were black cab drivers. So I had to wrestle my luggage back from them to go to the place where the marked cabs were. I had to kind of yank it out of their hands and also push other black cab drivers (who were yelling "hello! hello!") out of my way to get downstairs to the cab line. Very troublesome. Then my cab driver just sat and didn't help me with my luggage and was rather rude and disagreeable in general. One of my bags was 70 pounds!

Finally back at my apartment, I had to carry my bags up 4 flights of stairs. Then, because my room was actually someone else's, I didn't have anywhere to put my stuff. Thankfully, there was a lot of discarded furniture kind of rotting in a trash pile outside our building. I picked up a small bookcase and a cabinet-like thing. A huge nasty bug crawled out of the cabinet. I tried cleaning and disinfecting them as best as I could. I also had to spend a LOT of time cleaning the apartment. The toilet seemed like it had never been cleaned. The bowl was nearly black and there was a lot of stuff caked in there. The kitchen counter was covered in something sticky and dirty. The tile walls were all splattered. The kitchen window had that sticky dirty substance and tons of dead flies on it. The floors were dirty. These are some examples. I bought a broom and a mop and some various cleaners and scrubbers and probably invested 20+ hours over the course of a few weeks getting it mostly cleaned up.

When all was done, I finally had: more than a dirty backpacker's wardrobe, my computer, some place where I could set up home. We had very little freedom in the CLS program (especially because we had host families), so I was looking forward to having some free time, having some personal space, and doing the whole living-in-China thing on my own terms.

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