After another great breakfast of congee and fruit, we headed to the Chinese University for Finance and Economics, or CUFE for short. It was over an hour outside of downtown, so the bus ride was pretty long.
After we got to CUFE, we were met by a bunch of students and escorted into a lecture hall, where we listened to a presentation by a PhD student about smartphones in China. We learned that most people here use forms of mobile payment and shop online a lot more than Americans do. This is because it’s really inconvenient to go to the store: you’d have to brave the traffic jams, get to the store, wait in line, and then get home again, which could make a simple shopping trip take over 2 hours.
After the presentation on smartphones ended, we had a quick “foreigner’s inside guide to China” speech by an American professor. He told us that the Chinese government doesn’t really regulate foreigners unless you really mess up. So in other words, no drugs. That’s the one thing the Chinese government really doesn’t like. Also, university only costs around $2,000 per year here. I wish Pitt was that cheap! 🙁
CUFE’s library is amazing and modern and sleek. I think we should just pick their library up and put it right on top of Hillman: it’s 20 times nicer than ours and organized so much better.
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Next, we had another delicious dim sum style lunch. This time we had some amazing egg drop soup and Thousand Year Eggs. Chloe and I amused ourselves by eating the hot chilis in the soup. Bad idea.
We learned that Chinese college students have to take a gym class. It’s not American gym, where you play dodgeball and mess around for 50 minutes-you have to lift weights, play volleyball, tennis, and basketball, and run track.
Our last activity at the university was a jump roping activity. As a general rule, I don’t do exercise unless I really can’t avoid it. So needless to say, I didn’t really participate in the jump roping activity.
Later today, a couple of us are going to go to the convenience store and then dinner and maybe some of the old historical streets in Beijing. Overall, today was an eye opening day.