Happy belated Mid Autumn Day. It was yesterday. It supposes to be a day you gathering with your families, chatting and having moon cakes. But since I can’t be with my family or Jenn, and I didn’t want to spend the day with my computer, I went out to a party in a International Student Hall in Russell Square, which I was invited by James.

It’s interesting to see a dormitory hall where students from several universities live together, quite mixed. But it’s more interesting to be among them after I graduated. It’s fresher week, and everybody was seeking names of new faces they meet, follows by what university and majors etc. Obviously they moved away from me rather quickly after found out I was a wrong target. Their faces were just like mine, four years ago from now, very excited and keen to talk to anyone who make a few seconds eye contact with them. Guess I will be like that again next week, when I start my job.

Anyway, after a pub quiz we went to that moon cake party. Speaking Chinese did give me some the feeling of being a festival. But most conversations kept making me realise that I’m getting old (mature), except for those with postgraduate students.

Here is the photo of the moon in Shantou in 2005, when I spend my only Mid Autumn Day at home for the last five years.

So, I’m in London now. As I blogged in twitter through my phone, the train was late for 50 minutes due to a “railway bridge damage”. When I arrived my friend Greg told me I was lucky, last time he had a two hours delay. But delayed train is good in a way that strangers can start a conversation easily by complaining the British railway, I saw couple of cases in the train.

After arrived in Kings Cross station I was starving. Although I’m not a pro-traveler, but from my experience I do know that price can be different just between inside and outside one place. For example, if you want to pee in the station it will cost you 20p, but if you do it in the toilet right before you get off the train it’s free. I got the theory, so I kept myself away from Burger King in the station and tried to find a place to feed my stomach outside the station. A place which worth to recommend here is a Chinese restaurant called ‘Chop Chop’ right opposite Kings Cross Station. It’s cheap, acceptable quality and they’ve got proper Chinese serving style. I didn’t need to speak out one word with the staffs there but managed to take order and pay, just eye contact and waving hands was sufficient.

Inside Chop Chop restaurant. The lady seems not very happy with me taking photos.

My Duck dish with rice and wanton soup.

At the station I got an oyster card, as a symbol of starting my life in London. Then I started my journey to my friend’s place, where I will be living next week before moving into our new apartment. After living in Tokyo for a year I was very confident with any tube maps in the world, including London’s. But still, it took me about 50 minutes to get to the destination. It was my first time to use DLR. Indeed, as my friend told me, it’s developed for the new area in East London, where also the banks located. While I was waiting at Poplar Station, I took a photos of the banks building as below. These two are HSBC and Bank of American, very cool, and gave me a proper welcome to London, also to my career life.

My exploration of London just began.

Eric and Faye just arrived Shantou University not long ago to start their teaching. I found their blog while I was searching blogs about Shantou. Eric just wrote an interesting post saying how he was impressed by the hard working university students. I have some thoughts here.

Indeed, most students in China work extremely hard. My high school can be one of the extremely examples. It’s the boarding school, we only got to go home once a week. Start from 6:00am in the morning, the whole school woke up at the same time and we had 20 minutes morning exercises. After that, 30 minutes morning reading before breakfast. We were told that human brains have the best performance and can memorise things quicker during that time. So the all the students were quired to do the reading, and we had to read it loudly. The class that wasn’t loud enough will be marked down and given warning. Then we were allowed to have breakfast from 7:00am, a little break, then start the whole day class. Evening was also studying time. From 7:00pm to 10:00pm, students were required to study in the classroom. 20 minutes break in three hours. I spent two years of my life in that environment. There was not much different to a military school, so after those years I was pretty confident that I can survive in any environment, it can’t be more hard core than that.

I was one of those naughty kids that can never get to the top of the class, nor the bottom. But students like me was only minority. The majority were working more hours than required. Some woke up 5:30am and start to memorise English vocabs, when others were still in their dreams. And they kept reading after 11:00pm when we were supposed to be in bed. Lights in dormitory were shut, but they used torch. There is difference between ‘passive hard working students’ and ‘active hard working students’. Obviously I was the passive ones in that environment, not because I was lazy, I worked hard, but there are always people work harder than you.

One of the reasons that many students work so hard was because of the competition. Imagine a class of 60 students, if 30 of them are ‘5:00am wake up, 11:00pm still reading books’ type, what can the rest 30 students do? If they want to catch up, they need to do the same. If they want to get good mark, they need to work harder. Schools in China is like a mini Chinese society, people work their ass out in order to achieve success. Of course, students in other countries work hard too, but it’s not the same level that can compare to students in China. I can say that because I just graduated from Durham, I did some comparisons through out these years.

The other reason I would say it’s the effort to change. As Eric describe in his post, quite a number of students come from poverty or from lower working class families. They work harder than those from middle or higher class families, because they want to change, they want to improve their lives and they believe the only way to do it is through education and qualification.

I see education in China in two ways. One is for those who really want to learn, and one is for those want to make a change of their lives. And right, I think the later ones is the majority.

Number One:

James just came back from his summer trip in China. When I asked him how long does it take from Qingdao to Beijing, he said ‘it only takes five hours’ by train’. ‘That’s quite a long way’, I replied.

Then we both realised he got used to the distance in Chinese scale, and I got used to the English one.

My train to London on Saturday is 3 hours, that’s a cross country journey!

Number Two:

We went to a restaurant called ‘No. 1′ in Newcastle China Town to have hot pot again for My friend’s birthday tonight. When I took him there a few months ago, he was like discovering a new continent and taking his friends there to try out. They love it too.

It’s funny when you walk into that restaurant. They have two sections - one for hot pot buffet and the other for the normal English Chinese buffet. Although there is no sign saying that hot pot is for Chinese customers and the other is for British, you can hardly see any British customers in the hot pot section. The same rule apply to the other one - few Chinese customers.

Tonight we sat on a table next to the counter. While a ladies was waiting for paying the bills, she looked at our table (the only one has both British and Chinese in hot pot section) and saw how we cooked our food. I didn’t hear the whole conversation between she and her friends, but I can’t help to catch one line, ‘I can’t be bother to do all these’. That remind me a scene in ‘Lost in Translation’, when they commenting a syabu-syabu (’hot pot’ in Japanese) restaurant, the guys said ‘what kind of restaurant was that, you need to cook your own food’.

The world is just so different!