Today we spent the whole day at CUFE, the Central University of Finance and Economics. When we first arrived, we were greeted by Aurora, our hostess for the day. She escorted us to our lecture room where Kai Long, a professor at CUFE, gave us a lecture on big data, e-commerce, marketing, and smart phone culture in China. It was really interesting hearing about the different topics and how they play into the structure of the smartphone industry here in China. One big thing that makes their market different from the U.S. is phone payment. Everyone uses Wechat wallet or Allipay, services much like Apple Pay, which is why a lot of places can’t make change or take card anymore here.
After the lectures we then headed to lunch in the school’s cafeteria and had another delicious banquet style meal. It’s funny because they never usually tell us what the dishes are unless we ask, but since I have no allergies, I think it’s more fun to go in and try things without knowing what they are. Today they slipped in a century egg into the mix of dishes for us to try, which was quite a surprise. The best dish however was the definitely the scallion pancakes. The hostess saw that we really loved them and brought us a whole new plate. I’m getting hungry just thinking about them they were so good. After lunch we got to go and take a tour of the biggest library on campus. It was gorgeous on the inside, way better than Hillman, in my opinion. They have a sign in system for students that shows them what seats are available in what areas of the library, so when they walk in they can pick a seat and guarantee it will be free. We need that system for when Hillman definitely. The lower floor also houses an art gallery which we got to walk through.
After the library tour we headed out into the blazing sun and played some games with the students that were hanging out with us that day from the university. They took us to their outdoor sport area which had various courts which people were using for their exercise classes. There we played double dutch and then formed teams to compete in a contest where we all linked arms and had to pass through a hoola hoop. The team who passed through the quickest won, and that team was mine !! We got to make the slowest team sing Old Town Road as a Punishment which was hilarious. After all the fun we took a short tour of the campus, which is preparing some buildings to be a part of the 2022 Olympics. We soon left our new friends and headed back into the city center Beijing. I headed back up to my room to refresh a bit and then headed out with some friends to see the famous snack street market a few blocks away from us. We had to take the subway, which is astoundingly cheap and way better than any subways I’ve used in America. I also stopped by Hey Tea, a famous tea shop chain from Hong Kong. My friend told me that when the shop first opened on the mainland, people waited 7 hours to get some. We had to wait thirty minutes for our order, but we got to walk tour the nightlife a bit and it was well worth the wait. Twas delicious.
