Life of a Student

Beijing is so big that it is common to live far away from where you work or study. One reason, as I've mentioned early on, is because it’s cheaper to live as far away from the center of the city as possible. On my first year in Beijing I was living in the school dormitory, so every morning I was late to go to my Chinese classes. The first few days I was on time, but eventually that wore off, and I woke up telling myself class was just three minutes away and therefore there was no need to get up so soon. A year later, my freshmen year, we had to move to the actual school campus, which meant we had to live somewhere hopefully closer to the school. Well anything too close to school was expensive, and because my roommates and I just weren't experienced enough in Beijing to look for a good cheap place we found something far and expensive.

I wasn't in Beijing at the time, and left the work for my roommates look for a place. Being that they were Koreans and we didn't have much experience in searching a place to move into, they found a Korean agent whom they could communicate with and wouldn’t feel like they were being ripped off. We ended up living in a nice Korean residential community (that place I got locked out from) forty-five minutes by bus away from our school. We hired a driver to take us to school every morning so we didn’t risk waiting for a bus that would be late. Going home was the tiring part, I went home around seven more or less. By the time I got home, I'd be starving and tired and had to decide between eating or just going to bed. This meant going to bed around nine！

I was such a good student, hahaha… Got up each morning around six, the first one in class, stayed in school for at least ten hours, and went to sleep starving at nine! Hahaha… What made me get up each morning was knowing that the driver taking us to school would be waiting downstairs; I hate making people wait. Imagine how early he had to get up. It was good motivation in making me wake up early each morning. Miss those days...

A year later, we had to move where our department building really stood, which was back where I had my Chinese classes the previous year. My roommates decided to move into the dormitory, and I made some new friend from freshmen year who were now my new roommates. We lived in an old, about to be demolished building, (the one with the scary lady incident) a fifteen minute walk away from school. I was back to getting up late. I went home earlier, still starving sometimes, and sleeping at later hours, or sometimes barely sleeping in order to finish some project. Such is the life of a student.