I have been away from my blog for a while,and since I haven’t travelled around just yet, I thought I would just write about my life in China.

The foreigners community in Jiangmen,where I live, is very small. Most of them are english teachers or business people. Having just finished my year abroad in France, my expectations about what my university in China would be like were pretty high. I figured there would be more people my age from different countries that were looking for the same experience I was. Wrong. Our classes are pretty small, and even though we have really nice classmates mostly Korean and people of chinese origin , we were pretty bummed about not meeting a lot of new people.

The first couple of weeks we were here,whenever we saw another non-chinese person on the street or at the supermarket we were actually surprised and kind of stared at each other for way longer than we should’ve. Now I play it cool though and look less like a psycho :p

Around early October, things took a turn for the better, and now we have a pretty cool group of friends. We actually met at the best western restaurant in the city “The Red Garlic”. On a Friday evening we went there for the first time with a group of foreign teachers from our university. On the table next to us, sat 4 non-chinese looking faces. At this point we knew we had to meet them if we wanted to have a social life. So I worked up the courage to go talk to this strangers and ask for their numbers to hang out some time.

I really like having friends here that understand and can relate to what I am going through and when things are tough we can complain to each other and not be judged. I often think about that “MTV Diary” line (what happened to mtv actually having shows about music huh? ) “you think you know, but you have no idea”. It applies perfectly. Unless you’ve lived here, you can’t really imagine what it’s like.

Not only did we gain a group of friends but from meeting them I also scored a job as an english teacher and found a dance studio to go to 🙂

Now we are actually a part of the foreigners community. We have attended the events that the city hosted for us on Halloween and most recently a Christmas party. I even celebrated Thanksgiving with our American friends.

As kids our parents always told us not to talk to strangers, but when travelling is the best thing you can do, with good measure of course (we all saw the movie Taken part 1, not 2, why would they even make a sequel for that movie…).