Our final full day in China is here, and needless to say all of us are pretty sad about it. We’re seeing the Yu Garden today as well as the market surrounding it, and then our final presentation is in the afternoon followed by the farewell dinner. It always seemed like the farewell dinner was…
Tag: Summer 2018
Day 2: CUFE and the Bubble Tea Hunt
Today, we took a trip to Central University of Finance and Economics. We had a presentation about big data and having efficient production systems. It was really interesting because I had never heard of it and never realized how prominent it was in my daily life. Later on, we took a tour of the university’s…
Day 3: I Understand the Beijing Subway Better Than the Pitt Subway
Today, we traveled to a university about an hour outside Beijing, went to a Chinese grocery store, and visited the Olympic Park. It was another jam-packed day, and I honestly have never slept so soundly than I have on this trip. After breakfast (they unfortunately didn’t have the pears, but they did have some crisp…
Day 2: Just Nod Your Head and Hope It Wasn’t a Question
Today is a really exciting day because we are going to the Great Wall today. This is a landmark that just like Beijing, I have only dreamed about going to. I never thought I would actually go there so soon in my life, and I was so excited to go. Before we went, I had…
Day 1: The Great Wall
Today, we walked up 70 flights of stairs to the Great Wall!!! My heart was beating so fast all the way up, it felt like I had been sprinting. It was all worth it when I saw the first piece of the Great Wall. We got up there in about 20 minutes. The scenery was…
Day Five: Heavenly Cultural Visits
Today was a day packed with cultural sites, led by the one and only Uncle Joe. Our first stop was at the Tiananmen Square, where we stopped to have Joe explain some of the relevance of some of the buildings and monuments. The Square houses the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, where citizens and tourists queue…
Day 1: We’re Not in Kansas Anymore Toto
Today was the day! It finally happened! We left for China, but it didn’t really feel real. I have been waiting for this trip for so long that it didn’t feel like the time had finally come. Yet, here we are getting ready to leave at a bright and early time of 2:15 am. We…
Day 3: Meeting Chinese Students
Today we visited a university in Beijing, CUFE. I definitely felt like a foreigner when the students looked at the group of us walking through the hallways, but I can understand it because if a group from their college walked through Swanson, we’d probably react in the same way. We sat in on a…
Day 0: Travelling to China
Today, we started out our trip to China dark and early at 2:15am. Most of us didn’t bother sleeping the night before so we stayed up in one of the Towers lounges and got to know each other a little bit. We took a chartered bus to the airport and arrived there before the check-in…
Day 2: The Great Wall
This morning was filled with excitement and anticipation – at more than just the pork buns at breakfast. We were going to see the Great Wall! On the bus ride over, I learned about the ring road structure of Beijing, which I found very different than the gridded structure of the cities I’m familiar…
Day 1: First Impressions
Beijing is an enormous city. I expected it to be big; but even just from looking through the airplane window, I could see buildings that stretched further than I could see. As the plane landed, I noticed that the skyscrapers were grouped, with 5 or 6 in each section. Everything in Beijing seems to be…
Reflection: “…but we never knew we’d look back and cry at the times we laughed”
Once in a lifetime. Those 4 words describe my experience on this trip. Whenever someone asks me how my trip was, loads of memories flood my mind and I answer “it was amazing! I miss it so much, it was seriously a once in a lifetime experience.” People would sometimes reply asking if I’d go…
Day Thirteen: Yu Garden and One Last Hurrah
Twelve days are in the books, and in front of us lies one final day in China. To start the day, we visited the Yu Garden. Before getting there, I envisioned the Yu Garden to have lots of green space and lots of beautiful plants like how a typical garden is set up. I was…
Conclusion: Xiexie
Today was the day we boarded our flights to go home. By the end of the trip, I was ready. Maybe it was the culture shock (or maybe the food poisoning), but I was feeling kind of tired of being in China and especially tired of eating Chinese food by the end of the trip. Most…
Day 10: Work Hard, Play Hard
Today the activities started to wind down as we began to gear up for our presentations tomorrow. However, today was a special day for me and my group because it was the site visit to our company, H&K! We had prepared a plethora of questions in advance. I was crossing my fingers that it would…
Day 11: The Massage was Needed
Today we had two more company visits ahead of us; first, to Delphi and then to the American Chamber of Commerce. Its crazy that these two are the last company visits of the whole trip! Most of the company visits so far have been more focused on the business side of things but Delphi seems…
Day Four: All Kittens and Sunshine
When we pulled up to today’s company visit, I thought we had traveled a few thousand miles and found ourselves at a German University. As I would later find out, this corporate campus was designed to look like a Western college, with lots of wide red-brick buildings and a central clock tower overlooking a large…
Germany Reflection!
Overall, this trip was amazing, and I’d return in a heartbeat if given the chance. There were many things that made this trip as enjoyable as it was. Firstly, the education: as nerdy as it sounds, I truly did enjoy learning about the automotive industry. I anticipated myself enjoying learning about the chemistry and physics…
Germany Day 13: Salzburg!
Today was our last day on the trip. We were given the freedom to do whatever we wanted, so most of the students decided to go to Salzburg, Austria. Although it wasn’t in Germany, this was one of the best parts of the trip. The plan for the day was, for the most part, tentative….
Germany Day 12: Farewell Germany!
Today’s start was a little bit more relaxed than most days. Now that we were done presentations, we were able to sleep in a little, and we taken to a traditional Bavarian breakfast. The meal consisted of pretzels and weisswurst. I am a sausage fan, so I enjoyed that weisswurst a lot. I ended up…