Sunday: 23/01/2011

Phil turned 21 in a country that is completely unaware of the significance of the day. To be honest, the dinner wasn’t anything that unusual. It was just like a Hibachi Grill back in the U.S. It was just as delicious.

The only difference was the option of all-you-can eat/drink! For 168 kuai, we ate way too much meat and drank way too many expensive drinks. There was one interesting cultural experience when we decided to get fruit while we were still a little hungry.
Someone ordered fruit and the chef asked us if we wanted ice cream. Without any hesitation we said yes! The only problem was that soon after, the chef turned the grill off and left. Servers stopped coming into our room and we were really confused. When we did manage to get a waitress back in, she was pretty grumpy. The chef returned and was cheerful, but everyone was reasonably confused. Apparently ordering fruit is a very clear sign of the end of the meal, and with a language barrier as severe as ours, that’s pretty important. We still left full and happy, but left the staff a little ruffled.
Also, here is a picture of the "across the river" part of Shanghai and an interesting link that will give a better idea of just how quickly this city is growing.

UPDATE: We’re pretty sure this dinner is why everyone got horribly sick.

Friday: 21/01/2011

Too early of a morning after so much Karaoke and fun… We had to get up in time to roll onto the bus at 7:00am. The engineers at Delphi’s new R&D facility in Shanghai have allowed us to come and receive a tour. Fortunately, we were all able to catch up on sleep over the 1.5-hour bus ride out west and we discovered real red bull at the supermarket next to Liu Bai. (It’s real red bull because it comes in a tall can and says “extra” instead of being short/gold and saying like “nutrition vitamin supplement drink”…)
This is “out in the middle of nowhere,” as in the buildings are only 15-20 stories tall despite being a full 2.5 hours from the center of the city. The campus itself is very nice, and after going through the gate, we emerged in a modern reception building with an Indy car planted in the middle. After an hour of speaking, two cans of red bull, and two cups of coffee, our liaison from Delphi in Indiana had effectively taught us about the radios and electronic integration they work on at this facility as well as the effort it has taken to find the amazing local talent that is currently beginning to fill the leadership roles in Shanghai. Within the next year or two, the plant will most likely be fully capable of running off local engineers and the American Expats that remain can go back home.
The tour was fairly in depth. We learned about some amazing testing they do. These include an anechoic chamber that rests entirely on springs for vibration testing, a “light room” that tests how black each black is, makes sure all the LEDs are nearly the exact same color, and verifies that the silver chrome line around the radio in your CTS-V reflects light the same way in the morning as it does in the afternoon and evening. My favorite room, though, is the listening room. Only three people are qualified enough to qualitatively listen to music in this room. Before speakers make it to Delphi’s car systems, they start in home audio. There is an overstuffed leather loveseat surrounded by at least a dozen hi-fi speakers and a few foam absorbing squares and wooden baffles. I was surprised there wasn’t a hookah or something in the corner. Either way, it looks like the best job in the world.
They also introduced us to their vehicle sensing systems that actually use a huge database of images to sense how quickly a car is approaching. It’s quite an impressive work of software engineering to process that much data as quickly as a car might rear-end you. The traditional approach involves motion sensors and radar, but isn’t as accurate and can’t distinguish between a car/truck/runner/raging bull. All told, I learned a lot about research, testing, car technology, and moving a business to a completely foreign country!
The night was also great, but doesn’t involve nearly as many details. It was John’s last night in Shanghai before he spends three weeks in Malaysia, so we went to the boxing cat. I learned a lot of useful Chinese from a bar tender that has learned English almost exclusively from his profession. We had some delicious local microbrews, and then went back to the school. After an hour nap… I ended up back at the Boxing Cat with a new group of friends. We played pool and foosball, socialized with other English-speaking people and I pulled off my most amazing feat yet! A friend really needed a red bull but I could not for the life of me communicate with this new bartender who didn’t know a lick of English. After a few frustrating minutes and no Red Bull on display to point at I miraculously whipped out a pen and wrote the Chinese Characters for red bull from memory! It was awesome and a great way to end the night.

Thursday: 20/01/2011

We got our welcome dinner from the University! We ate at a family-style restaurant with lazy suzans at each of the tables.

We were split up with six American students and two Chinese faculty or students at each table. Everything was a little quiet and awkward at first, but as the next-door work party got louder we were forced into mutual pain. I will now take a moment to discuss Chinese business:
They drink a lot.
They don’t drink often, but they drink in large quantities when they do. A work party is employees only, no spouses and no one outside of the immediate work force. The goal is to have fun, while competing for who can keep their composure after a constant flow of wine. Needless to say, not all of them do, and when you put loud speakers, karaoke, feedback, and a Chinese celebration in one room, quite a ruckus escapes past the half-walls they put up to section our dinner off.
Regardless, it was great to meet some of these people. A few of them may be at Purdue in the fall, and most of them will join us at the Min Hang campus in a few weeks. Chris is an awesome guy who’s been extremely helpful and will join us in Thermo later this semester. Audrey is really fun and is going to Sheffield University in Great Britain this summer. We really got to know them when we went around the corner and upstairs to this crazy-awesome KTV!
KTV is “Karaoke Television”… I don’t know why they’re all called that, but they are. The lights and decorations were all halfway between, gaudy, futuristic, and fancy.

It’s quite the impressive show. We were broken up into two rooms, each with a couple mics, several TVs, and nice couches. Songs are chosen through touch screen, and it was clear that if we weren’t here as University Students, the staff would have consistently brought plenty of beer instead of water. There is an interesting respect for University students in China. It’s as if the whole country goes out of their way to protect them. The reason college students don’t drink very much in this country is for their protection… which makes a lot more sense than the mentality in the U.S.
After two or three hours of everyone growing hoarse, learning a few new songs in Chinese, and bonding over the words and terrible attempts to hit Freddie Mercury notes in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” we all went home.

Wednesday: 19/01/2011

Teahouse field trip! We had an hour-long bus trip to go to this very nice teahouse surrounded by gardens and ponds.

The tea is considered “very good tea” by Chinese people, which Sa Weiqi warned us does not mean westerners will like it more. My culture class group lucked out and ended up with mostly good tasting teas, but some of the flower based ones were hard to swallow. (Our Chinese culture class was broken up into groups of five or six. Mine is “Flying Turtles” and consists of Tom, Emily, Brett Bannon, Isaac, Alek, and myself.) The servers took forever to notice us, so we just munched on the billions of types of dried fruits and nuts until we finally realized everyone else already had tea and called over the server (fu wu Yuan).
I got the Eight Treasure tea, which I’m guessing had eight treasures floating in it. We were only able to distinguish a few, but we’re pretty sure there were orange peel, lotus root, and chrysanthemum. For these herbal teas, they just let the plants float in the teapot and when you’re low on tea, they add more hot water to the stew. Each batch tasted a little different as different herbs take longer to infuse (I just made that last bit up), but they were mostly delicious. I got my caffeine fix from the more tedious Oolong tea that a few others got.

This tea takes around half an hour to make and involves lots of putting different things in different pots with different amounts of hot water. I don’t remember it in detail, but it comes out quite well. It’s always loose black tea for Oolong tea. They way you drink it involves a tall skinny white porcelain shot glass and a short fat one. For every drink, the tea is poured into the tall one, the fat one is placed on top and the whole deal is flipped upside down. After it sits for a little while, the skinny one is lifted out while twisting, leaving the fat one with tea in it. After you smell the “hot scent” of the now-empty skinny glass, you can drink the tea. After drinking, you’re supposed to take in the “cold scent” of the now-cooled skinny glass.
Overall, it was a great experience! We lounged in separate opium-den beds with pillows, a small wooden platter with a grate for spilled tea and lots of pillows. The surrounding glass windows gave a view of a pagoda over the pond and plenty of house cats hanging out in the rock and gardens.

I now feel like I partially understand the environment that Edgar Allen Poe was so addicted to.

Tuesday: 18/01/2011

It’s snowing outside! This makes me happy for two reasons: snow is awesome and pretty, and we should finally get out of this cold snap and be able to go outside with fewer than 30 jackets at a time! Either way, I don’t have that much to do today outside of schoolwork, so I’m going to try to catch up on past events, starting with Saturday.

I’m going to be completely honest, I was not very impressed by the performance I saw. What we went to was called a “loud rehearsal,” so the actors of the Peking Opera were singing and moving around, but there weren’t any impressive costumes or dramatic scenery. The footwork was really cool, as the Peking Opera performers are famous for extremely quick foot movements, but without the ability to truly understand the plot of see flashy outfits, most of the entertaining aspects were lost on me.
Tori, Phil, and Jordyn brought back some good memories and souvenirs though!

They were volunteered in addition to other Chinese people in the audience to go on stage and prove how good they were at this specific dance move that involves opening a door as a shy girl. It was hilarious. Apparently this is something that all Chinese people have done before or see often, but the others on stage had excellent execution while my friends struggled with the basic steps. They did get a great signed hanging poster out of the deal though! It made it worth it to get mocked unceasingly in front of hundreds of people you don’t know or understand. Later, everyone in the crowd was singing this traditional song that is in Chinese, has crazy inflections and no apparent regard for key. (But everyone sings the same off-keyness.) Each section in the audience took a turn singing it and everyone would clap for each other with the exception of our group. Instead of laughing at how terrible it was, I’m guessing they were very offended because the audience went completely silent afterward and just quietly talked amongst themselves… oops!
The rest of the day was surprisingly uneventful. On Sunday, I finished learning about 2-D systems with one degree of freedom, did my quiz and then went to old town near Yu Yuan gardens. We were aiming for the gardens, but instead ended up in this awesome shopping center. Tons of neat little shops line the streets selling anything you can think of. We learned the phrase “too expensive” or “Tai gui le” is the only offensive thing you can say while bartering. For some reason they immediately shoo you out of the shop. If you offer a ridiculously low price, and then act disingerested or even walk away, you will get chased down and sold the item for 1/10th of the asking price.
Monday delivered two incredible discoveries! Discovery number one, if you leave the lid open on the electric tea pot, it will keep the button depressed and continue to boil, finally making the room humid. (There is pretty much no such thing as central air in china. Most places are the temperature of outside with the exception of apartment and hotel rooms which have a little unit with a hose leading out the window. A unit like this does not have a humidifier like the awesome one I helped install back home over Christmas break.) Discovery number two is a huge grocery store! These are so hard to come by, that it was really fortunate. Our intercultural teamwork professor mentioned it to us. We now have access to one of the largest supermarkets I’ve ever seen, despite the fact that it is entirely underground, and a department store where normal people probably buy clothes. Outside of this store, the clothes seem to be either ridiculously expensive imported European clothes in the mall or cloth with stitching falling off.

Thursday/Friday 13-14/01/2011

The past two days have been like a shelf with awesome bookends and a whole bunch of 120-page angsty teen novels in between. Either way, it was awesome! I won’t delve into the shoddy collection of books; it’s not worth the time it would take to type.
Bailey took Tori and I on a long run up north, and we got to see just a few of the great shops and restaurants and sight-seeing in Shanghai. We turned around about 3 miles away from campus after we got to these incredible skyscrapers and a gigantic golden temple-looking pagoda building.

The smooth round wood and intensly artistic designs looked really out of place in the middle of an extremely busy interesection, surrounded by shopping malls and glass/steel office buildings.
A small interjection: we finally found those delicious dumplings filled with soup! Tori randomly remembered what she repeatedly heard her dad call them at Dim Sum, and from there it’s been incredibly simple to order them. (She claims they understand what she’s ordering because she so good at Chinese. I disagree, but either way we’ve agreed that she does most of the communication when there is no english involved, and I jump in if the person speaks any English. For some reason it’s nearly impossible for her to understand broken English, even if it’s reasonably well spoken.)
Friday night was the most fun I’ve had here, and quite possibly the most fun I’ve had in my life! I randomly saw an advertisement for “Boys Noize” in a bathroom stall earlier in the week and decided to take Tori, Bailey, and John Hermes. It was 150 kuai to get into this “concert.” I use the term concert very loosely as it was a line-up of six awesome international DJs playing from 10pm to 6am at Mao Live House, which is only a block or two from campus.

When we first showed up at 11:00, the place was almost empty. We nearly doubled the population despite the very loud and awesome dance beats going along with the crazy lights and huge LED screen. It seemed we had made a huge mistake in thinking they would appreciate techno/house in China. After realizing there was no chance to get our money back, we hung out for about half an hour, sipping on relatively inexpensive drinks listening to very good music. To make the most of it, Tori and bailey started dancing like crazy people in the middle of the empty dance floor with at least a 20ft radius of nothingness around them. It was hilarious!

Apparently it had an effect though, slowly over the next half hour there would be 2 or 3 people filtering in every ten minutes, and more people filtering in the door. By 1:00, the third dj was up and it became the best dance party I’ve ever seen. We checked our coats and had a blast! The best part about a dance party in China is that drugs are extremely hard to get ahold of, so you know the people around you are sober and being crazy for the fun of it.
There were a ton of Europeans, quite a few dance moves I’ve never seen before and probably never will again, and huge fuzzy panda hats with dangly fuzz balls hanging from the ears. We finally left around 2:30 as the red bull wore off, but were considering going back after a nap since the party was clearly going to continue up to or beyond its 6:00am expiration.
I’ll try to upload pictures of the dance party soon. To tide you over, here’s one of Me, Mike Lorenz, and Nick Bradford playing this awesome dice game some people here showed us!

You roll five dice each, and say how many dice of a certain number you think are out there. So, if I think there are at least 3 threes between Nick and Mike, and I have 3 myself, I’ll say “six threes!” They can call me out and we’ll have to all expose how many we have. If I’m right, he has to forfeit a dice and vice versa. You can say something to the person that’s guessing, and that may subconsciously throw off the rest of the groups mental count. Ones are wild, and there are a few more rules, but that’s the gist. Chinese people play it in clubs all the time, and it’s hilarious because the clacking sound of everyone shaking their dice cups fills up the room.

Wednesday: 12/01/2011

The past few days have mostly just involved getting acclimated to having class and homework everyday, but yesterday involved two huge breakthroughs in food! First, for breakfast, I was shown the best restaurant near campus. It costs 1.5 each for dumplings larger than a softball filled with meat. Two of them constitute a full meal and are absolutely delicious! Isaac showed me the place. Then, at lunch I managed to find by far the best food in the dinning hall on campus. At this particular station, you pick a kind of chicken and they add a tasty soup to it that has a ton of noodles and cilantro, and I was able to successfully order exactly what I wanted in a timely manner. Finally, I settled on the absolute best dessert offered. It’s just a flaky sesame bun with a slightly sweet white bean-paste center, but it rounds out any meal perfectly.
At night, I worked on building guanxi with a local bar. (Guanxi is a very important concept in China and holds a lot of sway. It’s like a combination of networking and relationships that is very situationally significant. My dad is one of the few Americans I know whith excellent guanxi.) The bartender's favorite beer is Hoegaarden and, like most places around here, has a buy one – get one free happy hour during the week.
This weekend, our class is taking a field trip to see Peking Opera with our Chinese culture professor, who is really funny – often not on purpose. It will probably be very interesting and very terrible all at the same time.

Monday: 10/01/2011

First day of classes!!! Woohoo. I guess more accurately “first day of class” as I’m not taking Chinese 101, so I get to skip the second 3-hour class 3x/week. Either way, I was awake from 5:30-6:30, slept again until 7:30 and then woke up to go work out. We were kicked out of the weight lifting area (my large rugby-playing friend Phil Moore) by a troll-man that must live under the stairs. He kept yelling and pointing at a sign entirely in Chinese characters as if we would understand that better than what he was speaking. Either way, we ended up running about a mile on the track and doing dips and pull-ups on these parallel bars they have next to the track.

There were tons of people doing tai-chi and other interesting warm-up moves all throughout the turf in the middle of the track. I hope I’m still as active as all these old people are when I’m their age.
Class was cold. There isn’t any central heat and we couldn’t get the heater or projector to work. We spent 2 hours talking about what concrete observations each group will make for our projects (my group of five includes David Keefe, Paddy Dutton, Bryan Lane, and Jacob Fritschle), which is transportation for us. If you want to see pictures of all the people in this program, scroll down a little bit in . Transportation here is crazy. We’ll be talking about mopeds, walking, bikes, crago bikes, cars (the cars tend to be really nice), subways, high-speed rail, and taxis.
I slept most of the day after class was over, but ran into a Purdue student named John Hermes who has been here since September in the dining hall for dinner. We ended up catching a happy hour with about six other students at an english pub with great beer on tap, and then a random chinese bar with mediocre beer in bottles. I learned a lot from John’s stories about the past few months and ended up staying up way too late, but it was worth it.

Sunday: 9/01/2011

What an adventure! We set out on Sunday to discover how to use the subway. Little did we know that it would be an all-day experience dragging us all over Shanghai. At first we just needed to find out how to use the cards to pay for trips. There is an option to pay for a specific trip or load a 1-trip card, but that wasn’t what we wanted. We needed these lightning-bolt cards that we were pretty sure existed but had none of the required knowledge to attain. This was with Tori, Bailey, Grant (really tall kid), Isaac (one of the few blondes), and Daniel Stubbs (non-descript appearance like mine but had a limp all day from basketball or soccer or something).
Either way, after wasting 7 kuai (a more common slang term for yuan) on a single-use card that got eaten up at the end of my trip and about half an hour, we were able to explain what we needed to the lady behind the glass. These cards are used. You pay 20 kuai deposit in addition to any money you put on them and get that deposit back when you’re finished. Also, they become demagnitized amazingly well. It seemed like each one of us took a turn being stuck behind the turnstiles, walking over to a pair of service people and having them reactivate the card. Despite it all the fuss, it was amazing!
It’s like another city underground. The connections are extensive, there are markets underground, the basements of all the malls near us are connected by the subway halls, there are tons of flashing lights, and this really cool hallway with futuristic-looking plastic walls that constantly shift color. I’ll hopefully post a video of that as soon as Tori gets her video camera fixed. (She dropped it at the first train stop.) After spending about ten minutes figuring out which stop we were at, I randomly picked “Hioananmen” or something like that and we went. Stepping outside of the shelter of the subway was quite the shock this time.
We were in a market of some sort… But it was finally like what you see in the movies with all the random venders lining the streets. I’m sure we were the only white people who had been or would be there for quite some time. It was the best experience though. We ended up in this fabric market where we were able to eventually understand that for 460 yuan, they would measure and make this specific fully-cashmere sharp-looking suit for Tori after 5 days of labor. This is from flat fabric to suit in five days for about 70USD! There were similar things for jackets also.
Eventually we got a little hungry and randomly wandered into this tiny hole in the wall with a boiling pot out front and worn down ceramic with plastic chairs inside. The dumpling soup was delicious, completely filling, and 6 yuan each! There were candied fruits we picked up from a street cart, Bailey managed to offend someone who was apparently cutting her a ridiculous deal. It was really cold and the lady was going to let her have these gloves for 4 kuai, but Bailey tried to ask for 3… it did not go over well. Apparently, it’s rare to find gloves for less than 12… Bailey was getting the deal of the century because she was a cold lost white girl. Oh well. She eventually got gloves for 5 times that price.

We got lost in quite a few back alleys and ended up entering a completely different subway stop than we left, but it worked out ok. We headed to the “hi-tech park” which ended up being a bust except for this awesome asian boy-band picture we took of ourselves on a rock. Will be posted later. After some arguing, we all decided to take the ride to “People’s Square” which is probably about as central and touristy as you can get in Shanghai. The buildings are all huge and amazing! It’s like if there were ten Sears Towers and John Hancock Buildings in one location in Chicago. My favorite is one that looks like an obelisk that is about to blow up the moon with a giant laser.

After ordering some delicious jasmine-orange tea at the local 85 Café, we watched a movie, entirely in Chinese, without subtitles, with the tagline “let the bullets fly.” I do not recommend doing this. It was 50 kuai and we made it about 1.5 hours into the movie before we had to leave. The movie had kind of an Inglorious Basterds feel to it and the audience kept laughing at the dialogue, but since we didn’t understand the violence and had no idea why people were dying gruesome deaths it was not satisfying in the least.
After coming back home, we ate a dinner in the dining hall of some rice and two meat-veggie dishes… All of the meat has bone in it. It’s extremely annoying, and I’m beginning to steer toward dumplings and dishes without meat. Imagine if all of the chicken in your orange chicken had a little bone in it. Yeah. Makes me fruit.

Saturday: 8/01/2011

Woke up early this morning, as expected… 5:00. Took a shower and was ready around 5:30. My roommate and I just hung around and tried to be productive, organizing the room and getting things set up. I took a panorama of the view from my window, it’s pretty incredible here.

Breakfast was an ordeal! We could not for the life of us understand what the server in the dinning hall was trying to communicate. Eventually someone who must have been a professor used his knowledge of English to explain that we had to pay with our student ID, which we soon realized had no money on it. In the flurry of confusion, he eneded up buying breakfast for all of us… It seemed to come to about 1.5 yuan for each of the six of us.
My roommate Jordyn’s friend Gavin, the GM for International Paper in Shanghai was planned to meet us later in the day to get phones and show us a little bit of the city, so we took the time given in between to aimlessly wander the streets of our immediate location. Lunch was delicious and simple at this chain called “85 Café.” There are many delicous pastries and bread foods all in clear boxes that you pick up in a tray with tongs, eliminating the grunting, nodding, and pointed involved in ordering from a menu hanging above the cashier’s head. Some of them have some ham in/on them, a lot of them have hot dogs involved… It was delicious and we ended up with Jasmine Tea while attempting to order milk tea, but Jasmine Tea is now my new favorite.
We wandered around some of the local malls, which have amazing beautiful decorations throughout, and found a lot of western stores that are similarly priced to in the U.S., but as I learned later, there are hidden “sales” everywhere that you can get if you ask.

I ended up buying three books, two of which were childrens books designed to teach kids english and one is entirely in Chinese, but I like the pictures. I think it totalled to around $12 USD.
Gavin picked us up in his company car (a grey honda van) and we drove to a mall that was about 40 min. by car from campus. There are 4 malls within a ten minute walk from my door, but apparently he likes this one better. Also, if an elevator has too much weight in it, it will skip your floor, so… after about 15 min. of failing to get an elevator from the parking garage we managed to find stairs and an electronics store. I got a cheap, bottom of the line Nokia color cell phone for 259 yuan and paid 55 for a sim card with 50 yuan preloaded on it. Overall, it was a pleasant experience and Gavin was amazing to have. Later, we found it’s much cheaper to get a used phone (Tori’s phone is a little bit nicer than the one I have and in good condition for ¥170.)
After shopping, Gavin took us to this spectacular Shanghainese dinner that ended up being around ¥90 per person that he paid for. Traditionally, you have cold dishes, and then soups, followed by hot dishes with some rice or noodles, and dessert. So, we had some cold chicken and tofu with a salty sauce on top, followed by a traditional bamboo and chicken soup that tasted almost exactly like canned condensed campbells but looked entirely different, and then some noodles along side a shrimp dish and a chicken/tofu/shrimp dish with spicy sauce. The entire time, everything was served with incredibly delicious jasmine tea in a clear kettle and tea leaves with a wire swirly stopper keeping the jasmine from leaving the spout. Eating whole shrimp with chopsticks was quite the struggle, but it’s worth it to do it right. On the shell is this delicious sweet sticky sauce, that you only taste if you correctly hold the shrimp right behind the head, bite the shell and pull the head away. Then, you drop it out of your mouth and hold it just above the tail with the chopsticks and pull the shell/feet off with your teeth and drop that to your plate. Finally, all that is left is the meat attached to the tail, still held in your chopsticks, and that is what you eat.
After Gavin drove us home, I took a quick nap and got ready to go clubbing. There is this fantastic club that plays great techno/house music and there was a chinese beatboxer and african drummers who taught us how to order drinks, but with so many people packed in and so much noise we would struggle ordering drinks without getting ripped off by like ¥300 even if we knew the language, so after about 45 minutes of dancing and half a rum and coke, we left, showed the taxi driver the business card with the intersection our hotel is at, paid ¥33, and I slept.

Friday: 7/01/2011

            Landed in Seoul, South Korea early in the morning and began the first of many experiences as sheep. Having no idea what was going on, one student would be led by someone in a uniform waving a hand and the entire group of 33 students would follow blindly. Fortunately, everything worked out and we landed in Shanghai just a few hours later! Attempting to fit several months worth of belongings from over 30 people was on a bus was hilarious at best, but after 15 minutes of struggling, we held half of it on our laps and rode to Jiao Tong University’s downtown Shanghai campus, where I will be living for the next 6 weeks.

            We were greeted by a family style lunch, including hot rice and luke warm vegetables and chicken (we were running a little later than expected). All told it was a pleasant experience. After settling into our wonderful hotel bedrooms, we again became sheep as we registered for classes and got our student IDs made. From there, some students wandered around the streets, but the spicy food I had for dinner had my stomach a little upset, so I stayed back with three other students, Bailey Lynch from PESC, Mike Brunns from a class my sophomore year, and Nick Bradford who I only know from this trip. We enjoyed a Tsingtao beer through a curly straw (what?!) in the hotel bar downstairs and then I went to bed early.