High School Exchange Student's Story: Marc, Germany   

Hey everybody, I am Marc and I just want to talk about my daily life in China. But first I think China is a great country and Shanghai is just amazing. Until now my life was very nice here and I think I also have already adapted to the life here, both the school life and the Chinese mentality.

So now I’d like to talk about my normal school day. Every morning means getting up very early because you have to be in class latest 7:20 AM. Then the first thing is either reading texts in the English book out loud or reading poems in the Chinese book.

After all this stuff the bell rings. That means that every class has to go the playground for the daily morning exercise. The morning exercise is a good thing because you get awake and your body gets fit for maybe 8 hours sitting in the classroom. Monday morning is different because every week two students from always another class will raise the Chinese flag. So Monday morning there is a small performance by that class and they will also say who those students are that raise the flag and why they were chosen to do it (So every morning the Chinese national anthem will be sung). Sometimes on Monday morning students get honored because they achieved something or because of their great work.

After that of course class begins. A normal class is 40 minutes long. After that there are 10 minutes break in that you can refresh your body and talk with your classmates. But! Not the bell ends the class, it's the teacher who does, so maybe it will happen sometimes that the teacher doesn’t have enough time for his class so that he won’t end class only because its break. That's a very common case in math lesson. Math is very hard in China and its one of the core subjects, so you will have it everyday in the week. Other core subjects are English, Chinese, Chemistry and Physics. So if there are only the hard subjects it's hard to survive everyday...but it works.

But for luck there are also those subjects like Geography in that every body talks and is always very funny with the teacher and also PE lesson. One day in the week is only playing what you want to play and the other days is do something but normally not the whole lesson, after that you can go to play basketball, badminton or football. I like PE lesson a lot because my teacher is very nice and we are good friends and he is also very funny.

As I am a foreigner and not yet master of the Chinese language I have two Chinese lesson the week. Both times it's two hours. This teacher is also very funny and also very good. We are only two students so it's very quick to learn with her and every lesson there is Chinese character test. This lesson is always very late so after that there are no classes anymore but we still have to stay in the classroom. That time is just doing homework, extra lesson because the teacher couldn't do everything in his lesson or you have a club activity.

So the school is very long and very exhausting but after that you can go to the outside to have dinner because the canteen doesn't provide dinner for students. My classmates doesn’t have time so often after school because they all have so much homework so parents often don't allow them to go outside but so that time you go out with them is even better. When I come back to school normally first is doing homework and then chat with Chinese friends. That's always very nice but you shouldn't go to bed too late because you know next morning means waking up very very early...