Day 10: One for the Engineers

Today was another day full of company visits. We first headed over to Amcham, the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. Whereas most of the visits so far have been from Chinese natives, the people we talked to were actually expats, so it was cool to get to hear a viewpoint of the Chinese market…

Entry #1: First Day Abroad

On the first day of the trip we left for the Great Wall at 8 am. Before we left for the wall, we got the all-inclusive breakfast and it was incredible. There was a wide arrangement of food from fried rice to pork and chicken dumplings. Along with the food there were a ton of…

Day 9: ECUST

Today was our first full day in Shanghai, Nancy’s home city, and man I want to move here !! We spent our morning at ECUST the East China University of Science and Technology. When we arrived we got a tour of their gorgeous campus in the middle of the city. It occurred to me that…

Day 7: Terra-Cotta and Tough Roads

Today we had to wake up early again so we could get to our first destination early, the Terra-Cotta Warriors. We had to go early so we could try to beat the crowds a little bit, otherwise it would have been hard to get a good view of the warriors in the pit. There were…

Day 6: Cherries and Kisses

After a day of pretty chill travel and a quick tour around the Muslim district the day before, it was our first full day in Xi’an. We had to leave a bit early to head outside the city to the Sun Village, a place where kids live who have parents in prison. Driving out into…

Starbucks Reserve Roastery SLAPS!

Before I get into the first full day in Shanghai, let me just briefly talk about the river cruise the night before. Shanghai is so cool! It’s basically like New York on steroids. The skyline at night is is like nowhere else I’ve seen with all of the lights. There are even two buildings next…

Day 4: Lost at the Temple

Today was the day we got to visit the infamous Tiananmen Square as well as the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven. Inside Tiananmen Square we saw a hella long line forming to see the body of Chairman Mao, but it was about 4 hours at like 9 in the morning, so we weren’t…

Day 3: Blown Away at Huawei

This was the day we had all been waiting for since before we left for China. Our visit to Huawei, one of largest telecommunications companies in the world, the phone brand second in world sales after Samsung and beating out Apple, and also a central player in the trade war and U.S.-China relations. Because our…

Day 2: CUFE

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…

Goodbye China

My time in China was enriching both personally and professionally. I learned a lot about China and business in China but I also got a better understanding of business and what I can do as a part of the industry. For one thing, I realized how important integrity is. From everything I saw with the…

5/16 Yu Garden

This is already our last morning in China! We drove the bus into Shanghai and got out to walk down a street that looked a lot like a mix of the Hutong district in Beijing and Muslim Street in Xi’an, the street even had some street vendors cranking out the usual octopus on a stick….

5/15 Yangshan Port

Today was our first company visit where we had to take a bus to see the different parts of the facility. Yangshan port is humongous, and we had to take one of the longest bridges I have ever been on to get there. Between endpoints, the bridge was a thirty minute drive and for a…

5/14 AmCham and Horiba

Today we visited the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) office in Shanghai, an organization that monitors and reports on business and trade between China and America. Despite how official the name sounds, the office isn’t actually related to other American Chamber of Commerce offices in different countries. I absolutely loved the presentation at AmCham. The…

Final Blog

Writing this last blog reminds me of all the wonderful experiences our Plus3 group had in China. I would like to share my highlights from each city. I was nervous to be in another country not knowing the native language, but Beijing changed my feelings quickly. Visiting the Great Wall of China was by far…

5/13 ECUST and Urban Planning Museum

Today we visited the East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai. When we got off the bus at the university I immediately noticed how different the university felt compared to the Central University of Finance and Economics, where we visited in Beijing, and the University of Pittsburgh. there was by far more greenery…

5/12 Terracotta Warriors

When we left the hotel in the morning the sky was clear and I was eager to see the Terracotta warriors I had been hearing about since elementary school. When we arrived we walked through the museum portion that explained the history of the warriors and their excavation process. I did not know that the…

5/11 Children’s Village and Pagoda

We started our first full day in Xian with a visit to the Children’s Village, an organization that shelters and takes care of children while their parents are in jail. Since the village was opened in 1996, it has helped over 2,000 children return to their families who would have been homeless otherwise. After a…

5/9 Forbidden City

I thought we did a lot on the day we visited the Great Wall, but today we bounced around what felt like all of Beijing visiting cultural sites. We started our day at Tienanmen Square, and it was an interesting time to be there. The day we visited was about one month before the thirty…

Yu Garden and Presentations

Today, we visited the Yu Garden and learned many interesting facts about the history of it from our tour guide. The garden was made by a Ming Dynasty government officer, named Pan Yunduan. He made it for his parents and named it the Yu garden because “Yu” means peace and satisfaction. There were many ponds,…

5/8 Huawei and VIP Kid

Today we visited the first companies on the trip, starting with Huawei, a major telecom firm, and VIP Kid, an online education startup that connects kids in China with English teachers in America. Before we even left the bus, Huawei set the bar for our future company visits extremely high. Beijing is an arid region…