Life of a chinese student - couchsurfing in Kunming

Green Lake of Kunming - close to the University and Lawrence's place

Kunming is the capital of Yunnan Province. There the Yunna university - one of the largest and prestigest universities of China - is located. It was founded in 1922 and has a total of 31.200 students from China and abroad. One of these students was our couchsurfer.

His English name - as every person in China has - is Lawrence. He just turned 19 and studies International Buisness. He was super interested in languages and gave us just after we arrived a Chinese language class. There are four ways of pronouncing each vocale depending on the accentuation:

Ā pronounced like a long A
À pronounced like an A but lowering your voice to the end
Á pronounced like an A but lift up your voice to the end
 pronounced like an A but the voive starts normal, deepens and then normalizes again like a curve

We also taught him some German and French and he catched it up quite quick. As a student in China, he said: you don't really have time for anything. Most of the time you need to attend classes or prepare them. And as we experience it ourselves the teachers are expecting a lot of flexibility from their student. Around 11 o'clock pm on our first evening his professors wrote him an email telling him that he has an important meeting the next day with them and two days later an exam and presentation. Completely out of the blue! Therefore Laurence wanted us to leave the next day in the morning but as it is impossible to find a couchsurfer overnight we could arrange with him that we leave his place at seven in the morning and come back late in the night and leave really early the next day to catch our train to Beijing. After a while he luckily agreed and we could stay another night at his place. Thank you!