Studing outside of Beijing

[Jamoldo]

Hi, I'm currently studying at BNU, and I am thinking of spending a semester outside of Beijing next year to get some clean air and maybe not be around as many foreigners (or English speaking ones). Places that come to mind are Dalian, Qingdao, Kunming, Chengdu and Urumqi. Does anyone have recent experiences in these places or other suggestions?

I've seen numerous posts about Qingdao, so I'm guessing its a nice place, but I haven't seen too much info or recent stuff about the others.

Thanks

[karmakid]

Instead of starting a new thread I'm just gonna add a university to the list. My contribution is HaiNan, they have chinese classes and are approved by the Swedish state scholar ship Board CSN (which means it cant be all that bad).

But I'd really like to hear something from someone that has actually studied there.

It would certainly be nice to spend less time on the dirty streets here in BJ and more time on mile-long sandy beaches, 对不对?

[Jamoldo]

Karma, I actually really like Beijing and lots of things about it. But I think it might be a good idea to spend a few months away from the the temptation of thousands of English speaking foriengers. I have nothing wrong with them, in fact they are my best friends here in Beijing, but it's going to hamper my speaking ability significantly unless I become a jerk and cut them off (which is not something I am prepared to do).

[amandagmu]

Hi, I studied this summer in Dalian and wrote an extensive post here:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/12-horse-horse-tiger-tiger-slang-and-idioms490&highlight=dalian

Looking back on it a month later, it was the best choice I could have made. There were almost no English speakers at all and all my classmates were non-English speakers. I highly recommend it. The Waiyu Daxue in Dalian has many more English and western speakers but Liaoning Shifan Daxue had close to none....

~Amanda

PS The air was indeed a lot cleaner than in Beijing