Today, Friday May 19 is our last full day in China and I am having mixed feelings. I’m sad to go and I’ll miss China but at the same time I am happy to go because I’ll see my family. We went to Yu Garden today and it was so so beautiful. I took so many pictures and I was even in some of them. I still cannot get into the hang of being in pictures. I am just so awkward. After walkimg around the garden, we were given time to shop for souvenirs and I was so happy because I really needed this. practiced my bargaining skills here and I was able to get things way way cheaper than the original price they gave me. I bought souvenirs for my family and my really close friends back home. My 5 friends and I had a tradition of getting souvenirs of a staple building in whatever city we were in. For example, I have gotten the eiffel tower. I got those friends the pearl tower in Shanghai. I hope they like them. I did not take pictures of the market because I had a time limit and was determined to get as much as I can.
As soon as we got back to the hotel, my group wanted to finalize our presentation so we got together. We practiced our presentation amd made some last minute changes. We are group 1 so we will be the first to present. I hope it all goes well. After we were done, I wanted to eat because I hadn’t really eaten all day. We did not have much time to eat so a group of us went out to see if we could get fast food. There wasn’t really any place we could go in, order food and just leave. It was like sit down places around the hotel and we did not have time to walk far. I ended up buying packed food, they warmed it up for me, and ramen from the convenience store. It was really really good.
It was finally time to present our final presentations, I believe I did well. For our pre-departure presentations at Pitt, I kinda messed because, unexpectedly, my slides were cut off. I think I redeemed myself, hopefully. After final presentations, we ate dinner as a group, it was the farewell dinner. The CEO of Asia Insitiute, an organization that organized this trip, accompanied us and it was an honor. This was our last dinner in China and it was a little sad. After dinner, I walked around the city one last time, took the subway and taxi for the last time, and said goodbye to Shanghai. I got back to my hotel, packed a little bit (saving the rest for saturday morning) and went to bed.
This has been an amazing opportunity and I learned so mucb from it. This is a trip I would take again and I highly encourage plus 3 China to freshmen engineering and business students. Thanks for reading:)