A stranger in a foreign land

Some International Students Present

To God be the glory!

I have been fully matriculated into UESTC. It was a very colourful ceremony. They call it Opening Ceremony. The auditorium was full of Chinese (of course! It's a Chinese University), but other nationalities were there too. Yes, "I was there some" :-), together with some other Ghanaians. There were Pakistanis, Vietnamese, Kenyans, Ethiopians, ... End of Thinking Capacity (sorry, I meant "etc", lol). It was great.



A Section of theStudents Present

 Although the ceremony was wonderful, I felt like a complete stranger. Why? They spoke only Chinese! :-( . The writings were also 99.99% Chinese. In fact, I understood how it feels like, to be an illiterate.The characters were meaningless to me. I was a complete stranger in a foreign land.

Anyway, the names and positions of the VIPs introduced were translated for us on a screen. The speech by the president of the university was also translated on the screen. But that was all.

More Students

My journey from Ghana to China

I was so excited when I got the visa to travel to China. It meant that, all was clear for me to travel to China for my PhD. I had longed for this day!

The journey itself was very long. I, together with another colleague, left Accra around 13: 50 GMT. It took us six hours and ten minutes to get to Cairo, by Egyptair, nine hours and fifty minutes, from Cairo to Guangzhou, and finally, two hours and five minutes from Guangzhou to Chengdu. The scheduled time between flights were supposed to be one hour twenty-five minutes (since we were just transiting) and two hours fifty minutes, respectively.

There was a delay in the flight schedule from Cairo to Guangzhou by about one hour, fifteen minutes. I knew that was going to affect us when we got to Guangzhou. In order to save time, we did our best by rushing to join the queue for the immigration processes, but we could still not make it in time to catch the flight (China Southern Airline) we had booked for Chengdu. Fortunately for us, we got a reservation on China Air for free. Apparently, Egyptair and China Air are members of Star Alliance. Since Egyptair's delay contributed to our missing the flight, another Star Alliance member had to bear the consequences. To cut a long story short, we got to Chengdu around 23:00 (GMT+8), the following day.

We lodged at a hotel and found our way to the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) the following day.