What better way to end a stressful week with a field trip to a highly industrial and technologically advanced industrial park? A mediocre field trip to a highly industrial and technologically advanced industrial park. To be honest, I was really looking forward to this trip, since the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) sounded very intriguing.
We had to take a one and a half hour bus ride to SIP, which I luckily slept through. When we got there, we sat through a brief presentation about the area, which I found to be the best part of the SIP tour. As for the area itself, it is impressive. The planning is meticulous, as should be expected for a place with Singaporean influence. We were given a bus tour of the park (which is enormous), but it wasn’t very interesting. Even though the place is clean, it’s too sterile for my liking. The streets are pretty much empty (probably because almost EVERYONE who lives there is working). I would hate to work there.
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Final day of an amazing trip. I was so sad to leave Yangshuo and Guilin. When we were leaving the hotel, the Speed Queen Laundry guy came out and helped us with our luggage. He even waved goodbye to me! The bus ride to the rice paddies was kind of long, but it was really comfortable because almost everyone had their own pair of seats since some people left earlier. As I should have seen coming, we were met by another climb at the paddies. We climbed halfway to get to the restaurant for lunch and another halfway brought us to the top.
The rice paddies were amazing, to say the least. It was one of the most impressive things I saw in Guilin, along with the Li River. Unfortunately, we were told they didn’t have a good rice season, so it wasn’t as beautiful as it could have been. We ended up seeing a lot of the rice paddies because we trekked from one section to another. We hiked for over an hour and ended up very far from where we started. The trek down took about half an hour itself.
I felt so tiny among these rice paddies
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The most exciting part of the day (save of course that wonderful Chinese test in the morning) was going to the back gate of ECNU and interviewing the food stand and restaurant workers for City & Environment class. I’m amazed by how willing people are to talk to you, even with a video camera taping them. We talked a three people and they all had interesting stories and it just makes me want to buy from them more often. Which I indeed did right after the interviews =X
Unfortunately, the rest of the day was nothing worth writing about. I don’t think anyone’s interested in reading about me nearly falling asleep in class. I think that’s a given by now, which doesn’t make me look very good. Oops.
Now that I’m a bit more settled in here in Shanghai, I’m going to have more updates other than the daily recaps. I’ll write about specific parts of life in Shanghai, like my long-delayed post about my apartment and eating.
Today was a make-up class day =(
OK, so it wasn’t that bad. I only had Chinese. The next make-up day will be the worst, since I’ll have three classes. And this was one Chinese class we needed because we have another test on Monday. Things are starting to get more difficult. We learned a bunch of new characters and the pinyin and tones are still killing me.
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