Today was our third day in Beijing!  We started the day with our first company visit at Huawei.  As soon as we pulled up to the building, we knew it was going to be a good visit.  The lobby was beautiful, and it had the biggest chandelier I have ever seen in my life.  They took us on a tour through their exhibition room and explained a lot of their new technology to us.  We got to see their 8k tv which had the clearest picture I have ever seen.  We also learned a lot about 5g and the process of installing base stations and everything they need for people to actual be able to use it.  They also showed us some artificial intelligence like a robot that was controlled by a person’s hand movements in front of a camera.  There was also some face recognition technology that we got to see and use.  They also showed us all their phones which were around half the price of phones in America and much nicer.  If they weren’t banned in America, I think we all would’ve bought one.  Our next stop at Huawei was the bathroom where we spent almost as much time as in the exhibition room.  It was the fanciest bathroom I have ever seen in my life, they had heated toilet seats and everything.  After spending too much time in the bathroom we headed to the conference room for a presentation and a Q&A.  After everything we saw it’s going to be very hard for any of the other company visits to top Huawei.

  After we left Huawei, we went to lunch at the biggest shopping mall I have ever seen.  The shopping malls here in China are different than ones at home because most of the stores here are luxury brands.  People buy most of their everyday items online so the only reason to go to actual stores is for luxury items.

 Then we went to VIPkid which was cool, but not as cool as Huawei.  VIPkid is a company that teaches English and Chinese to kids online.  They hire teachers from the US and Canada to teach Chinese children.  We got a tour of the office from a former Pitt student who moved to China a few years ago.  He also gave a presentation about the company and the few years it has been in business.  The main points he made were that the company focused on having a sense of community among teachers even though they work from home.  They have a lot of events for teachers to go to and get to know each other.  It was interesting to learn about such a new company that has had a lot of success so far.

 For dinner we had even more dumplings.  I think the eight people at my table ate at least 100 dumplings together.  After dinner we had our first experience on the subway to the Olympic sports center which was very crowded but cool to see.  We were getting a lot of stares for being such loud Americans though.  The Olympic sports center was really cool especially because it is all lit up at night.  There were tons of Chinese people wanting to take pictures of us, it felt like we were famous.  I wish we could’ve gone inside some of the buildings like the birds nest but it was still fun just to walk around outside.