After going to the Great Wall and Summer Palace the day before, I was pretty much beat and fell asleep around 10 that night, so I woke up after about 8 and half hours of sleep ready to take on the day. Today we were going to visit the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing. I woke up at 6:45 and got some breakfast because the key to surviving the morning is eating a massive breakfast. It took us a little over an hour to get there. So far, it seems like it takes forever to get anywhere in this city. Our bus rides are consistently about an hour-long which sucked.
We got to the university and met with some of the students and a lady that was a director of one of the departments at the university. All the students were pretty cool and most of them spoke pretty good English. Richard was by far the most chill one of all of them! He was the one that did the bulk of the talking during our tour of the library. Before visiting the library though, we listened to two lectures from professors at the university. The first one was about smartphones in China and big data and the second one was actually given by an American guy that has been teaching there for a few years and he talked about China’s role in creating/influencing items or people that may be in our lives today. The lecture room was ridiculously hot though, and I couldn’t really focus because I was so uncomfortable!
After the lectures, we went to go eat our lunch; which was another feast, by the way. The lunches are always so good. Authentic Chinese food is way better than the Americanized stuff that we have back in the states. At lunch I got to try some pork blood, which was decent at best, and a 1000-year-old egg, which kind of tasted like a more flavorful hard boiled egg.
After lunch, the students took us to tour the library. The library was actually way better than Hillman because it was way more open and it wasn’t so hot in there that I was sweating. They have a pretty cool system where you walk in and reserve your seat on a terminal at the entrance. I thought that was an awesome idea because it allows you to see if there are any seats available before walking around the entire library and not finding a seat. I got to talk to a lot of the students while in the library, so that was really awesome to find out how their student lives differ from ours.
We finished up our library tour and now it was time to do some jump rope and hula hooping. I’m not going to lie, I thought this was going to be stupid, but I quickly found out that it’s as fun as you make it, and it ended up being pretty fun actually. The whole time, all the other students that were outside were watching us, but I was starting to get used to that by this time, so it didn’t bother me.
Once we got back to the hotel, some friends and I chilled out and wrote our blog for the day. After that we decided to try out some Chinese McDonald’s. We all ended up getting bad stomachaches, but I still think it was worth trying out! Then we decided to go out for some drinks for the night and that was a whole lot of fun!