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May 19, 2009
Tuesday
Authored by JM
We started out the day with class from 9:00 till 12. The class was on the legal environment in China. We weren’t going to be tested on the material, but the class was actually was pretty interesting. We talked about how the laws are made and how they are dealing with the economic reforms. It is funny because the communist party is truly in charge of everything. They have a legislature that comes up with “laws”, but the laws that come out of the legislature are very vague and are interpreted by the executive branch. The executive branch decides how they want the law to govern and whether or not it is in line with the communist’s beliefs. There are no checks and balances in the government, it is all decided by the party leaders. The other funny thing was that there actually are multiple parties within the government for some disagreement, but they can never challenge the communist party. These parties have no power; it is just a show for the western world.
After the legal lecture, we had lunch at Yan again. This is the same restaurant that we ate at for basically the entire trip and we ended up leaving for some Subway. During lunch, we had the opportunity to plan our trip to Shanghai. We were looking at hotels and ended up deciding to just go all out and get a really nice hotel. It turned out to be a Radisson with a 5 star ranking, free Internet, and most importantly a swimming pool. It felt good to get a room and have the trip planned a little considering we are leaving on Saturday.
We got back to the classroom around 1:30 and had a lecture with Brad. He went through the purchasing power parity and how the exchange rates work. China’s currency the Yuan is pegged to the dollar, which means that the government spends a lot of time buying American dollars to insure that the currency doesn’t float. The problem with buying up all these US dollars is that now the Chinese government has a 2 trillion dollar stockpile of dollars that they are stuck with. They have basically been buying US treasuries and financing our debt. It is a unique situation not only for China to be in, but also for the United States. The Chinese dollar trap is one that we will watch unfold into the future.
Following class, we all went back to the hotel. John was pretty tired today and ended up falling asleep, but I finally had the chance to make it back to the gym. We got off our gym schedule a little and it felt really good to have the chance to work out again. After the gym I ended up going with part of the group to the martial arts show, while John stayed back to relax. The martial arts show was a little boring….actually very boring. It was also close to 90 degrees inside the theater. During the performance, I had a very difficult time staying awake, but what I got from the performance was that martial arts began with monks. They practiced it not for violence, but to maintain peace. The other thing I got from the performance was that Kung Fu Panda was actually pretty accurate.
Following the performance, a group of 4 of us went to get some dumplings. The dumpling place was a short drive from the theater and ended up being one of the top ten restaurants in the world according to the New York Times. The place didn’t have the atmosphere of a top ten restaurant, but it did have really amazing food. We ended up getting close to 50 dumplings, fried rice, noodles, and some chicken. The dumplings were really good. They were smaller then normal dumplings and when you bit into them, they had some juice inside that would explode out. It was a very satisfying meal and ended up only costing 15 dollars….China is just so cheap!
The group of us went back to the hotel to meet up with the rest of the group, but it turned out everyone already went out to the bar to celebrate Shreyance’s (a guy on our trips) birthday. I called up to the room and John was still sleeping, so I ended up heading over to the bar with Danny, Alex, and Nick (the same guys I got dumplings with). The rest of the group was at the bar already and Shreyance showed up close to 11. Shreyance was drunk by the time he got to the bar and kept saying that he couldn’t take pictures because he didn’t want them on facebook for fear that he wouldn’t get a job. I ended up leaving around 12 when the group was heading to a new place….Shreyance was falling over the couches at the bar by that time anyways, so I figured he always already satisfied with his birthday. It has always been really fun celebrating birthdays on this trip and it was fun being with everyone, but it was nice to be back a little earlier. John was up when I got back, but that ended up being the end of the night.
Posted by jfavorit at May 19, 2009 03:13 AM