Oh, School...

It’s Wednesday night in the beautiful city of Dalian, and Elbert is snoring away the night like usual.  It’s amazing how my perceptions about school change once the classes finally start.  So, on my last blog, I was really excited about classes starting.  When I look back on it, I don’t think that it was so much because of the fact that classes were starting as it was that I would be a part of a Chinese University.  I am still extremely excited to be enrolled here and able to be amongst all of these scholarly DUT students, but class, not so much excited.

Not the best looking pic, but this is the view from our hotel.  The campus is most of that area to the front, and also a lot more that cannot be seen.  Notice the mountains in the background.  Dalian has mountains like this surrounding the city.

Let me first off say that I enjoy my two classes, a lot.  For my first class, which goes from 9:00 to 11:40 each day, I have met three Chinese students that are majoring in Human Resource Management.  (We all went out to lunch together today at this delicious restaurant!)  HRM is the title of the class that we are all in, and the professor that is teaching the class is an extremely accomplished individual.  He is one of the better teachers that I have had in a long time, yet because he is such a great teacher, he expects a lot out of the students. 

It’s very interesting being in a class with only 5 students, one of which is me.  In a class that is somewhat discussion based, and with only two people that speak fluent English, being on top of our game in terms of what we are talking about in class is a must.  There is no hiding in the back of the room behind the students that spend all day studying.  It is just us two, directly in front of the teacher, with nothing holding him back from asking us questions about the material to get a feeling for how prepared we are for class.  Basically, we both have to put in a lot of time to get prepared for these classes.  It’s about 3 hours of work each day for this one class.  Bummer…

The next class that I am taking is a class about Chinese culture.  I enjoy this class greatly.  We meet up on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and go for about 3 hours.  For this week’s class, one of the activities that we have to do is go speak to a high school class and share some things about what life is like in America, and especially what it was like in high school for us.  We all have formed teams of two and will separate out to the different classrooms when we arrive tomorrow.  We are supposed to speak to them for an hour, so I’m hoping for a class with many questions!  It should be a lot of fun.  School in China is much different from school in the U.S., so I believe that when I explain what high school was like for me, the students will be very intrigued and dying to ask more questions.  I am very thankful for our school system and the amount of freedom that we receive.  The school system in America does I pretty good job of helping students develop creativity.

We all got partnered with a student from DUT today.  This is me with my friend, Grace (American name).  We went to two museums.  This one had a lot of paintings and old artifacts, while the second one had things of nature.  It was a very interesting experience. Her extracurricular activity is dancing, but mostly studying.

I’m pretty exhausted and need to sleep before my long day tomorrow, so I’ll post a few pictures of some things that we have done. On a quick side note, the price and quality of food here still amazes me.  I have to completely stuff myself to eat a meal over US 1.50.  I also must admit that I have grown extremely fond of rice.  Rice has become my bread.  I have big scoops of rice to go with 2/3rds of my meals.  I’m diggin’ it!  

The group that I am here with all went up to this restaurant on the 20-something floor of a hotel.  It was a buffet style restaurant with all kinds of different variety's of food, including seafood!  Also, unlimited beer.  To top it all off, the room spins so that you get a great view of all of Dalian.  The City is beautiful.

 

More of the city.  This view is from outside of the Natural Museum that we went to.  It was a bit smoggy today, but it was still quite pretty in person.  Right on the ocean