In 2017 I was selected for an exchange program at the Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. I spent 3 weeks studying in China. Of course, being a tourism student, I visited the highlight in Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai. Read all about that in my travel guide about this unique country. In this article I tell you all about my experience.
If you prefer to watch to watch a video instead, this is a Q&A I filmed about my experience. It’s in Dutch, but it has English subtitles.
Dorm rooms
We spent 3 weeks at the Gongshang Campus of the university. There are multiple huge campuses around the city and each campus is the size of an entire Belgian city. The dorm rooms were entire building complexes with shared rooms. The Chinese students studying here often share a room with 4 people. Since the Chinese university sees our visit as enriching for its own students, we barely had to pay anything, just our flight, the trips our Belgian school had organized and some expenses during our time off.
We were lucky to have a room for 2 with a Western toilet, not a hole in the ground. We could request to have a roomie of our choice in advance. Since I get along with anyone, I decided I wanted to be surprised. I ended up with a great new friend, an architecture student of my Belgian university, we got along amazingly! There was Wi-Fi, but in China a lot of social media platforms are blocked. I had a VPN to work around this first world problem.
Nights out!
The dorm rooms on campus were closed from 11pm until 6am. This meant that we could only go out until 11pm or you had to go out until 6am. We did both. One time we had dinks and tried to make it back home in time on our scooters whilst singing in the rain. We made it and the ride back through the rain was even more exciting than the drinks.
Another time we went to a club where the Dutch DJ Jay Hardway was playing. We stayed up until 6am and one of the Chinese students that went with us was asleep at a table the entire night, covered in confetti. All she wanted was to spend time with us. I told her afterwards that we had fun, but that there were plenty of other ways to do that.
Food options
I still miss the lunch options, although you quickly get sick of rice and chicken every day. There were multiple cafeterias on campus. Each one had different food stalls where you could see the food being freshly made. As a foreigner it was easy to see what a dish was like and when you made your choice, you could point it out. You then had to scan your card that had credit on it, gifted by the university. That credit was more than enough for 2 warm meals a day and a breakfast or snacks from the shop near the dorms. We didn’t have the same warm food for breakfast, since Belgians don’t usually eat a hot meal first thing in the morning.
Although there were plenty of different food options, we did miss Western food. We found out there was a McDonald’s not too far away and would drive there on our scooters a couple of times. There was a Pizza Hut near the dorm rooms where we ate once or twice. I remember I had a Peking Duck pizza, since I loved it so much in Beijing. Something memorable about the Chinese restaurants were the turning tables. When in a group on an excursion, we would have lunch at round turning tables. The food was put in the middle and the middle would turn around so everyone could have some of everything. Whoever the best dish started with, was the luckiest.
Classes
Every day we had a class about a Chinese theme. Some examples are calligraphy, tai chi and Chinese arts and crafts. We held a talent show with Chinese students, both showing off our talents and sharing our culture. It was lots of fun! Walking around the campus in the evening, there would be podiums set up for talent shows, like a singing contest. There was always a lot going on.
One of my favorite classes was the cooking class. We got to make dumplings and sweet pumpkin fritters. As we entered the kitchen we held our breath, because the smell was unlike anything we had ever experienced. If you believe you know what it’s like for something to stink, you don’t until you’ve been to China, I swear! Luckily, that didn’t mean the food was less fresh or less delicious. We had lots of fun playing around trying to make the dumplings and eating everything afterwards.
The school organized a field trip tailored to each field of study. For us tourism students they included a Belgian/Chinese chocolate factory/museum called Afición Chocolate village. Which looked a lot more Chinese than Belgian. There were lots of decors for photoshoots, which seems to be a big thing in China.
Transportation
We drove around campus on electric scooters we rented because it was that big. It saved us precious time in the morning to get to class. (I am not a morning person!) The scooters were battery powered, so quite green. When we ran out of battery, we could go to the shop to get it replaced by a full battery and then the shop owner would keep the other battery and load it for the next time. It was super-efficient and cheap since they fit 2 people and you can split the cost.
It is also possible to grab a taxi to get around. We always made sure we had an address of our destination that we could show the driver. Often Chinese people outside of the university couldn’t speak English, so if needed we communicated via an app that translated to Chines. After a visit of the Xixi Wetlands were free to have lunch wherever we wanted. We took a taxi to a restaurant, but when we wanted to get back there wasn’t a single taxi that wanted to take us. After losing a lot of time and running very late, we spotted an old Chinese man with an old bus along the road. We convinced him to take us in his old bus, what an unexpected adventure! Luckily, we made it on our school bus in time!
More to explore
I hope you liked this article about studying in China and going local in Hangzhou. I also made a Q&A in Dutch with English subtitles where I talk everything through with video clips of the trip. To learn more about visiting Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai you should check out THIS ARTICLE I wrote. Here’s the after movie of the visits. There is so much I still have to experience in China. I would love to go back one day for 2 months to see all the rest.
If you are interested in exploring more of Asia, check out my article about my time in Tokyo.