Daily Life on Campus

First actual real week of ”studying” is now behind. If you wonder why I wrote “studying” instead of studying, it’s because during last week there was some education conference in Washington DC where almost all lecturers were. So last week there was no actual classes, I only manage to meet teacher assistant and got course syllabus and materials that I was able to do required readings… So this week is actually the first real week.

But about living on campus itself, as I wrote on one of the previous blog texts, it is what it is: Definitely not something to call home but as a place to stay its fine. Campus here is quite bigger than I have used to in Tampere but on the other hand, I think it is even smaller on its size than NUI Maynooth (Ireland) or this is just built in very compact size. Campus itself is like a small town inside a big city, there is everything you need so if I would not like to, there would be no need to leave campus area at all… Supermarkets, cafe places, restaurants, teaching facilities, sport field, doctor etc. But still I prefer also to move outside of campus once in a while, otherwise I would become crazy :D

The campus itself is truly nothing that could be called as beautiful. It well represents Chinese communism style architecture: box shaped, apartment buildings side by side and not barely nothing green (park etc.) between them. Beijing Normal University is established at 1902 and its most “beautiful” building is the main building (on the picture), so as you can see its nothing to compare NUI Maynooth (established at the end of 18^th century) or even Tampere University (established 1925) looks beautiful to compare on this one.

There are many places to eat on campus, even a real restaurants (i.e. one nice sushi place) but then there are a real student “restaurants.” One of them was actually more or less how I was imagining a student restaurant to be like: A big hall, with simple benches and long tables. In the hall there is eighteen different “booths” were you point out what you want and they just smash it on a plate. But in general what I do like, there is so many different option to choose from that I could easily go at least two weeks to eat different meals every day.

Teaching is arranged in teaching buildings (tadaaa..), and there are 10 of them (I think), but as far as I understood each subject is centralised into one or two different buildings. My classes are either on building two or four, which are like 10min walk from my dormitory. Facilities in a classroom actually reminds me like the classroom back in the school. There is about 25 desks in one classroom, a real old fashion blackboard and of course a “teacher’s area” at the front of the classroom is a small platform so teacher can stand a bit higher ground than students. Modern technology, not really, only a computer and projector.

Only a bit more modern area was library, or at least it looked like it as I entered there. Its quite big, eight floors high and guess what… Only one floor contains foreign books, all others are in Chinese. When I looked around a bit further it looked more or less as normal library as I’ve used to… except I didn’t see any group working rooms/areas, only areas that were reserved for reading.