Moving to Chengdu after Beijing!

[liqi]

Hey all! A few months ago I made a post about living in Beijing studying at Tsinghua and how it was kinda disappointing (damn, it feels like ages ago!). I said i planned to move to Chengdu, and well... I did! I've been here for around 3 months more or less studying at 川大, and damn, I super love it!! It seems like my problem was Beijing after all 😂  😂

 

Life here just feels so much nicer in pretty much all aspects: the people, the city, the noise, the ambient, the price xD hahaha. I found Chengdu to be an insanely well-planned city, much more than Beijing, everything feels like it was built with a purpose and there isn't a single wasted space in the city. Not that Beijing isn't well planned, but Chengdu clearly learned from decades of Chinese urbanism and it shows. Everything is green (y'all ever seen the 2nd elevated ring road?), there's parks, squares, open gyms, leisure spots and such scattered everywhere. And the city is SUPER dense, you can get everywhere very quickly, "the other side of the city" is like 10km away hahahaha, very different than living in Haidian. There's a little Mahjong bar on my 小区, and since I learned a tad bit of Sichuanese the old men inside absolutely LOVE me 😂 every night where I'm coming back from somewhere they invite me to play

 

As for the uni, it's pretty great! Leaps and bounds better than the Tsinghua course, who would've thought heh. We have classes every morning (at least in my schedule) and a bunch of electives in the afternoon if you want. We also have a class that I think it's pretty damn fun, we gather the classes and go to touristic spots together around the city and interview locals, we even did a presentation at a 中学! Hahahaha. There's electives about Ba-Shu culture, sichuanese dialect, even japanese as a second language lol! The teachers are really nice and don't really pressure you much, which is a welcome breath of fresh air

 

My chinese also improved greatly! I suppose that after a level you don't really notice your improvements much and may underestimate yourself a lot (good ol' impostor effect). I left China before classes started for a while and ended up being placed in Beginner II, which I thought was OK. But when classes started... so damn easy!! I was afraid of the Boya Intermediate books because they say you need 3000 words haha, but it ended up being surprisingly easily! One day out of boredom I thought of doing some HSK4 practice out of boredom to see how I was (that was the level I thought I was) and to my surprise I smoked that test 😄. I also took some HSK5 practice exams and got around 50%, which isn't enough, but I think it's quite good for the guy who thought he would need to learn HSK3 material 😆

[language_lover]

Exciting move. I love both Chengdu and Beijing but I'd love to spend an extended period in Chengdu. Interesting that you seem to love Chengdu much more than Beijing.

 

Hope you enjoy your time there and keep your Chinese on an upward trajectory.

[杰娃娃]

I studied at Sichuan University 8 years ago, and still live in Chengdu. It really is a great city!

 

While you're at ChuanDa, I would recommend any optional classes taught by the department head, 游老师 if he's still there.

 

His course on Classical Chinese was one of the best courses I've ever taken. Not just in Chinese, but across all subjects.

 

[abcdefg]

Glad that you made the move and that it is working out well for you! I love the buzz and vibrancy of Chengdu, the friendly people, the great food and wide selection of excellent tea, but would soon yearn for more days with clear skies.