May 18, 2009
Monday
Authored by John
Our group of 8 students met at 8:15am to go over the logistics of our presentation. Though it was almost complete, we had to finalize who was saying what throughout the PowerPoint presentation. Our question we were assigned to present was "Who's prices are cheaper: Carrefour (a French supercenter) or Wal-Mart in China." This answer could have probably took us just a minute or two, but we had to make it at least 10 minutes for the presentation's sake. So, we decided to play a little game - The Price is Right! So we called down "random" people from the class to guess the price of different items we found in each store. It ended up pretty funny, as we tried to give them better and better prices as they got questions right (and people were eliminated). Then, for the final showdown, we had a bundle of items which were guessed on. The winner got a bag of chicken feet! Which they actually sell in the supermarkets here....
Anyway, we had a short lecture from that and had KFC delivered to the classroom. It was good, and allowed us time to go back to the hotel and blog until we went to the "Alumni Panel" at 3:30. We boarded the bus and it took us about an hour to get us to, as Brad claimed, the largest Shopping Mall in all of Asia. It was right next to the Grand Hyatt (which is super nice) and across the street from our Alumni Panel destination. We walked around the mall for a while, JM bought some Jordans, and things didn't get weird until everyone sat down at a coffee shop and I left by myself to get money out of an ATM.
Right when I re-entered the mall, a girl approached me (which is fairly common in China, they seem to love Americans). She was with her friend and asked if I was American. I said yes and she said "welcome to China!" .. she was wondering what I was doing here and I told her I was studying and I didn't know where an ATM machine was, so I asked them, thinking they could point it out for me. They got the wrong idea from my question, for they started leading me to the nearest ATM machine, asking questions the entire way about what I was studying and how old I was... Anyway, I finally reached the ATM and took out money (I had 1 yuan left and we still had to eat dinner). As I was leaving, they started following me and asking where I was going. It was about 5, and our panel didn't start til about 6:30. They wanted to know where it was, when it was over, how long I would be there, etc. Then, they asked what I was doing afterward and if I wanted to go get drinks with them! I was just like, umm, sorry, but I have to go with my group... and they were like well let's just get drinks now then! and I reply, I'm sorry but I really have to go and basically ran off. On the way back into the hotel (it was only a football field or 2 away), TWO more girls came up to my saying "Excuse me?, Excuse me??" It was TOO WEIRD! I told my professor and he said that prostitutes often come to this high end mall to try to pick up foreigners who look like they are alone. I felt unsafe haha. The weirdest part to me was that they just looked like normal people.. it was bizarre.
Anyway, after that we went to this Alumni Panel. There were 4 Michigan graduates that moved back to Beijing to work. They had all worked in the states previously, and they were from Amazon, a PE firm in Beijing, an investment bank in Beijing, and Intel. They were really good at answering our questions, but we got very hungry and tired fairly fast. It was very informal, just us asking questions about the transition from US to China, and the current situation in this crazy country.
We were very tired, so we went to a pizza place close to our hotel and came back at about 11:00 or so. I thought I was gonna pass out right when I got back, but Amanda got online so I stayed up for a few extra hours :)
Posted by jfavorit at May 18, 2009 04:57 AM