Studying abroad in China

The BIT is a campus university as well, so everything you need is is reachable with a 15-minute walk. In fact, the campus is rather small (Wikipedia tells me there are some satellite campuses further away from the city center, but I didn't visit those), and a 20 minute walk takes you from one end to the other. In the center of the campus, there's the gymnasium with lots of volleyball fields, football fields and the like. The gymnasium was in fact used for the 2008 summer olympics and the paralympics (only volleyball and goalball, but still). I however didn't use the gymnasium, so I can't provide any insight on their quality.

Again, food is good at the campus and very cheap, if you stick to the official canteens. I'm talking about 4 cents for 400g of rice cheap, so you can eat to your heart's content. However, there's a little problem: The dining hall's opening hours are relatively short (most people we talked to had dinner at 17:00, or 17:30 at the latest), and when you come late, there's only table scraps left. Also, the mass of students arriving for lunch and dinner was enormous. Since there was only a short time for eating, it was very crowded. For these reasons, I mostly at at one of the many other restaurants on campus, which also provided very good food for a bit of a higher price.

My accomodation was sufficiently nice. It was a relatively small, shared room, maybe about 15 m² (always had nice roommates though, so it wasn't a problem) in the exchange student building, and 3 rooms shared a bathroom. The bathrooms were mostly a mess (which is to be expected with university students, I guess), and I had difficulties adapting to Squat Toilets. But everything was acceptable, so I really can't complain. Several of my fellow students took to searching for apartments outside the campus, but apartments in Beijing are also relatively expensive, and the process seemed to be rather laborious (including registering at the police, finding a real-estate agent etc.). That said, I paid about 7500 yuan (800 €) for three months, so rent was still a bit expensive. On the other hand, the chinese students slept 6 people in the same size room, and did not have a bathroom in their apartment at all. In the mornings and evenings, people were walking around in bath slippers and pyjamas to take a shower, and that at -10°C. I should probably be glad that I was able to take a nice warm shower in the apartment instead of having to walk around first.

Also, we paid for both heating and internet. There was a heating element in our room, but it never got warm enough, so I turned on the aircondioning additionally, which added up to a fee of maybe about 200 CNY in toto. Internet was a bit more frustrating: It was slow, cost 200 CNY per month, and additionally, the Great Firewall rather diminished the usefulness of internet access.

Everything on the campus was rather grubby too, but I think that is a cultural difference. We Germans are known as neat freaks anyway, so this wouldn't surprise me. However, functionally, the campus was good too, as the library was rather nice, and the rooms were sufficient (but rather cold).