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May 15, 2009
Friday
Authored by JM
Last night was a short night for everyone and getting up for breakfast was an especially slow process. Breakfast was the same as always and class began around 9:30. Today we had two back-to-back 3-hour lectures, but both were about different subjects.
The first lecture was about the Chinese cultural values. Professor Fan provided a introduction into the culture of China, but went a little too far in the generalizations. It was a tough lecture because she kept contradicting herself with important points. She kept explaining how humble the Chinese people were, but they would explain that they like to buy fancy things and talk to each other about the price of these fancy things. It was hard to grasp how these concepts go together. Also, she explained to us that children no longer go to the bathroom in the street and the fact that we saw that was a rarity. However, even the day before at the Olympic village, we saw a child go to the bathroom right in the middle of the street. Learning about the Chinese culture was interesting, but the execution was poor. We gave her some leeway because of the fact that she had to summarize all of the Chinese culture in 3 hours, but it still could have been more focused.
Lunch was at Yan, the Chinese restaurant that is down the street from the University, and today the food was enjoyable. They served some traditional dumplings that were very good, but the sauce was very different from the dumpling sauce was have in the states. We had time to kill after lunch, but John and I ended up talking to Brad Farnsworth (the professor on the trip) about the cultural exercise in the morning and about different parts of the trip.
After lunch, we proceeded back to class for the 2nd half of our lecture for the day. This lecture was about the Chinese economy and was taught by Professor Li. Professor Li was an energetic and knowledge person, with an incredible memory bank of information. He is a writer for the Economist magazine, where he writes in the Asia section. He spent his lecture discussing the economies trends and where he sees China going in the future. Also, he provided insight into the workings of the government and how many politicians were once graduates of Tsinghua University. I had a chance to talk with him after the presentation and came away with the impression that he has an grasp of not only the Chinese economy, but also the world economy.
We were all back to the hotel around 4:30 and John and I ended up relaxing because we had a group meeting around 6:30. During the time, I did some of my laundry in the sink (I am not too sure how that worked out, but it smells clean) and watched some TV. The group meeting lasted about 2 hours and we put together a presentation comparing the prices between Wal-Mart and Carrefour. The presentation turned into the Price is Right and it is going to be interesting to see how the final product turns out.
By the time we were done with our presentation, John and I were both pretty hungry and walked over to a local Subway. It was an interesting experience because the flavors were a little different, but overall the food was very similar to that in the states (the turkey definitely didn’t look the same though). Following Subway, we went over to the grocery store to pick up snacks and prizes for our presentation. We settled on Chinese candy as a runner up prize and chicken feet as the grand prize. The chicken feet were served in a sealed bag, which looked incredibly disgusting, but should make for an entertaining prize. By the time we got back to the hotel, it was closing in on 10 and John and I both felt exhausted. We also decided it was time to go to bed partially because we were tired, but mainly because the next day our flight to Xian was at 7:45 am and we all had to be up around 5 to go to the airport.
Posted by jfavorit at May 15, 2009 02:36 AM