Destination: Jinan

After spending days on a train, the less than two hour ride from Beijing to Jinan seemed like a piece of cake, but as I would discover soon enough, nothing is quite like you’d expect in China. Beijing South Railway station seemed almost like an airport – my backpack was checked before I could enter the waiting area, where we all had to wait at our “gate” to get our tickets checked before we could enter the platform. At the station I met Jan, one of my fellow students from Leiden. Including me, a total of six students from Leiden would be coming to Jinan this year. Jan, Giovanni and I would rent an apartment together, same for the other three. That Tuesday morning, the high-speed train would take Jan and me with 300km/h to our

destination, though I have to say that from inside the train you don’t notice at all that you’re travelling at such speed. The train was very modern and the almost all female staff were dressed like stewardesses, every once in a while passing by offering snacks or fruit.

Time flew by and before I knew it, we were at Jinan West Station, where my buddy was waiting for us. Shandong University had appointed every one of us a buddy, a Chinese student who would help us survive those first few days in China. And boy, was I glad she was there. Her name is Guan Rui and not only was she willing to help us with a myriad of problems, she was also extremely nice. She had just arrived back in Jinan after the holidays and took a cab with us to our apartment. When it seemed like our landlady wouldn’t arrive for another hour, she took us out for lunch and gave us a tiny tour of the campus, which was within walking distance. Back at the compound of our apartment building, we still had to wait more than an hour before our landlady showed up to let us into our new home.

There seemed to be barely enough time to take everything in. The next few days we spend cleaning, going to the supermarket, buying food, buying stuff for the apartment, more cleaning, fixing bikes, arranging wifi, fixing our toilets, meeting the other students from Leiden and doing lots of exploring. In the end, we had to go to the police station three times, to register ourselves as students living off-campus with permission from Shandong University.

Sunday was registration day at the university, where we ran into Lisanne, a Dutch student I knew from Leiden, who was already in Jinan for half a year. Later that day, we even felt forced to study for a while for our placement test the next day. This test would decide in which level and which class we would be enrolled: elementary,

intermediate or advanced, with each level again divided over three classes, each class slightly higher in level than the last. I was really glad to end up in intermediate 3, the highest class of intermediate, and quite relieved as well, because I didn’t feel ready for advanced yet.

Then we still had a week to go before class would start and our endless list of little tasks and things to be arranged seemed miraculously to come to an end. So, me and four other Leiden students quite randomly decided to leave Jinan for a day and go climb a mountain: a holy mountain to be precise, Taishan, or mount Tai, which lay a 20-minute train ride from Jinan. It is one of the five Great Mountains in China and quite a must-see. We picked a day with sunny, warm weather, though the pollution didn’t allow for a very far view (standing at the foot of the mountain, there was even hardly a mountain to see because of the smog). More than 7000 steps

to the top, the last few hundred very steep, but the five of us all managed to get there. Almost more intimidating than the heights, were the old men climbing the steps carrying big, heavy loads, their pace slow but steady, eyes only for the next step. It wasn’t crowded, but there were still quite some Chinese tourists, some more experienced than others. I saw women in high heels trying to climb the steep steps, and parents who thought it was a good idea to take their young kids to climb 7000 steps. As practically the only westerners there, we attracted quite some stares. After we rested our legs at the top, we walked back down until the halfway point, where we took a bus back to the town of Tai’an at the foot of the mountain. There we had an early dinner at a great restaurant (though hunger might have played a part in that as well), but when we got to the station to wait for our train, we were all practically sleeping on our feet. Our apartment in Jinan is on the 10th floor, so imagine how glad we were that our building has an elevator.