This morning we met at 8:00 and drove about an hour and a half away to the Central University of Finance and Economics. The campus was nice to walk around because it was flat and had a lot of trees. The first thing we did was attend a lecture on big data, the consumer differences between China and the United States, and the E-commerce market in China. It was more business oriented, so some of the stuff the speaker talked about kind of went over my head but learning about the consumer differences between the United States and China was very interesting.

For anyone planning to go on this trip in the future, we communicate through an app called Wechat, which is widely used in China. It basically does everything. You can text, play games, and use it like apple pay. Liliana (one of our guides) says that most people do not carry around cash but use Wechat or a similar app to pay for things. She even said that some businesses have stopped accepting cash altogether. E-commerce is big here, so it makes sense that some businesses would no longer want to deal with cash.

After the lecture we had lunch in the school’s cafeteria. It didn’t feel like we were eating in a cafeteria though. Instead, it felt like we were eating in another restaurant. Once again it was served family style. The U.S should invest in some of the tables that they have here in China. These spinning tables are nice because everyone shares all the dishes that are served so you get to try a little bit of everything and still end up of full. It’s a nice concept. After lunch we had a tour of the campus library, which was insane. Apparently, it cost about $30 million to build. It seems to be a big place for students to hang out. They spend most of their time there, whether they are studying or not. In the basement of the library there was an art gallery of Chinese symbols. Then we went outside for some ice breakers with a few of University students. One of them was the human knot. The group I was in somehow managed to make our knot impossible to untie, so we eventually had to admit defeat. Physical education is a big deal at this University. The have rigorous PE classes that they have to pass in order to continue on in their education. We were having our ice breakers while a couple PE classes were going on right next to us.

That night, our entire group went to visit the Water Cube and the Bird’s Nest from the Beijing Summer Olympics. I think I was only eight or nine during that Olympic games, but I distinctly remember seeing the opening ceremonies and these buildings on TV. After spending some time there, we all took the subway to one of Beijing’s famous markets. It was cute, but pretty crowded. We strolled up and down the street for a while, and then we took the subway back to the hotel.