Welcome to your fishbowl.
The Liuxuesheng Gongyu 留学生公寓, or foreign students' residence, is the biggest residence building on campus. It's 15 storeys high and has both single and double rooms; the ones we were staying with came equipped with bathrooms and tiny balconies, which were heavenly and also useful for laundry-hanging purposes.
There are kitchens on either side of the floor, each with a (hopefully functional) washing machine. You can buy washing machine cards from a room on the first floor (past the elevators and down the hall to your left when your back is to the front entrance)--these are pay as you go. Each load of laundry costs about 3 kuai.
There's no wifi; you connect to the Internet via a cable you supply yourself, and you need to buy minutes on a card you can purchase either at a small desk near the front entrance or at the convenience store near the North Campus cafeteria.
Visitors have to sign in at the front desk, and are not allowed in past 11 p.m.
The staff at the front desk are friendly to varying degrees. None of them speak English, which makes your first few days (or weeks) a challenge but is a good incentive to learn Mandarin phrases for, "I forgot my key," "I need an Internet card," "My door is broken," etcetera. Hopefully you won't have to use that last phrase.
Keep in mind: Your accommodations are way nicer than any the Fudan students have. They're almost all sharing their rooms with several people; they don't have heat or air conditioning that you have; they don't have ensuite showers and their shared bathrooms close at a certain time every night. Remember this and try to be nice about it.
I have to be honest: I really didn't enjoy the fishbowl aspect of the dorms. Everyone in your building is foreign and a sense of entitlement and privilege pervades the place. It's a bad place to practice Mandarin or learn more about Chinese culture. That said, your living situation is pretty damn comfortable, and you get out of something like this what you put into it, I suppose.
