"In America, I Sleep on the Floor"

Arriving at the Duke program’s dorms, I wasn’t sure how much I could expect from our facilities in the post-communist-but-pre-effective-building-code country that is contemporary China. Having spent the previous month sleeping on my basement floor during our house renovations, though, I figured as long as I got a mattress it probably would be a step up (sorry, mom and dad – I still love you more than Hu Jintao). The airport had raised my hopes, as I landed in the much publicized new international terminal, probably nicer and more modern than any airport terminal I’ve seen in the U.S. But seeing as the government doesn’t often bulldoze houses and hire expensive British architects for student dorms (even during the Olympic summer), I knew it wouldn’t be quite so nice.

Having spent a few days in them, I’m pretty content. They’re air conditioned, which is great. They’re roomy, which is nice. There are beds, which is more than you can sometimes say for America. But the computer in the room, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have a functioning operating system. The TV displays only its logo. The refrigerator didn’t work for a few days and my roommate and I decided to use it as room temperature storage, only for it to one day decide to turn itself on. The shower is not separated from the rest of the bathroom, and when you run it the bathroom fills with water. I've heard the floor-shower is pretty standard in China, but the other ones that we've encountered have all had a sloped floor for the drain. The overflowing water is actually a theme of the building. The dorm itself is two towers connected by two bridges on the 10th floor, and a large auditorium in the center. The center pavilion with the auditorium is level, with no gradient or drainage, and as such becomes a pool in the rain (it has rained more than half of the days since I've arrived). As a result, you can't use the second story entrance during the rain, when it's roped off for safety. Like the TV, refrigerator, and bathroom, it seems to have been built somewhat cheaply and quickly, with functionality as an afterthought.

These aren’t big problems, though. We have laptops, so the computer isn’t important. We have enough work that we probably shouldn’t watch TV anyway. And my roommate bought a squeegee, which allows us to corral the water back into the drain after showering. The big problem is the internet. I expected to encounter speed problems and censorship, but haven’t had difficulties with either so far. The difficulty has just been getting connected. In a building with Ethernet ports in every room and wireless throughout, the server just seems to randomly ignore passwords and sever connections, meaning that I haven’t been able to consistently access the internet for any length of time. Some other students have been able to get it to work, but the employees in the computer office here don’t seem interested in helping at all. It seems that the apathy of technical support is a cross-cultural phenomenon.