Day Five

Today was a long day but I spent a lot of time using the public transportation. We started by going to the train station to purchase my high-speed train ticket to Shanghia for Monday. I am excited to ride that and hopefully see some more of the countryside. After that, we rode the subway for another hour or two to a place where Belinda had to register for a weeklong class she has next week. Belinda was telling me that during the weekends the subway is usually full the entire day because most people do not have to be at work. During our ride, she taught me to count to ten. Once I learned that it was extremely easy to count to 99. She also took me to the World Park. It is a tourist place that has miniatures of famous sites around the world. It was cool to get an idea of how big some of the structures are as each replica had a sign explaining it and giving the ratio it was to the real one although, a lot of the time the English version of the signs had misspelled words and bad grammar. This evening I presented a power point to the a few Animal Science students who were still in the area. It was interesting to field their questions, as often they were quite different then ones I would expect from students in America. I also had a chance to spend some more time talking with Geoff about the culture, and the way they organize things. He was telling me about how the university had about 30000 students and they had about 30000 Profs on the payroll as after they retired they received 75% of the salary they had their final year. This was set up when they only lived a few years after retirement but now that they are living longer, it is financially crippling the university. They resolve this partially but selling out the burden of the pension to companies who buy the research from the university. He said once China gets their ducks in a row they will dominate the world markets and take the world by surprise. However, they would require some drastic changes in the life style of many of the workers. It is always very interesting to spend time talking with Geoff as he has had so many experiences and looks at China with an outside eye so he can explain a lot of the things that I notice.

Ethan Spronk