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On the west side of Shanghai, properly known as “new Pudong,” lays Shanghai University of Electric Power. As we arrived more than a dozen students were waiting to greet us. The campus was alive with the shuffling of students from building to building. A large sign made for us read “Welcome Teachers and Students of Lander University.” After checking in we meet with students over lunch which we made ourselves. Making dumplings was a fun activity to get to know the students. I was able to get to know Javerse who was a freshman student who helped teach us to make our lunch. After lunch we participated in several activities with the students including a game of charades and a game similar to “Simon Says.” After getting to know the campus we went to play basketball with some of the students we had meet. Everyone stared at us on the court and we were the loudest people playing. It was funny how every time Kiera or Melanie would make a basket Kiera would run in a circle screaming “yeah” and Melanie would do a funky dance. I found the others students on the courts playing were very quiet and the more I watched them play the odder the playing seemed. The mostly all male students playing basketball mimicked styles of the NBA players yet had poor technique and made very few shots. Another noticeable difference in playing style was that there was little to no guarding on the part of the defending team with players giving the opposing player lots of space to take shots. It seems that while basketball is very popular and everyone there knew the main players in the NBA like LeBron James the aggression of the game was non-existent. For dinner Friday night we went to a place some of the American English teachers called the pink table cloth. The food was very good but also very spicy. 
On Saturday we travelled to Dishui Lake and the East China Sea. The lake was very large and beautiful. People were camping in tents on the bank. At the sea we got off the bus and walked down a long cement boarder to get to the water’s edge. The tide was out and the water left pooled in the muddy bank was warm to the touch. The mud of the sea bank allowed for many Chinese visitors to capture shelled crustaceans, either oysters or clams. After seeing the East China Sea we took the long bus ride back to the university. At dinner Saturday night we returned to the pink table cloth with an English teacher named Jeremy and his wife who also taught English at the University. Three students from the University attended dinner with us. I was able to speak with two of them one named Ellen and her boyfriend Jo. Ellen wanted to discuss politics so we had a great time trading rhetoric of policy making and government opinion. One of her most interesting viewpoints of America was about America’s entrance into Iraq. Ellen saw the American incursion into Iraq as a “big mistake.” She said that she felt “our parliament” had made an error in entering Iraq and said that she only understood the reasoning behind it as a way to gain oil rights or to make money through war profiteering. I found it interesting because it showed me that the United States global actions often are interpreted in many different ways by the many nations in the world. Ellen’s boyfriend Jo was less interested in talking politics. Jo said his biggest issue in the political realm was that North Korea was acting erratically and he saw a US-Chinese partnership against North Korea as the right move. Jo was more interested in discussing the differences in US culture to that of the Chinese. One of Jo’s friends went to New York for an exchange program and told Jo that while at a bar an American woman tried to take him back to her room for the night. Jo said wanted to know if this was a common occurrence in America because in Chinese culture he said the majority of families were more traditional (or in our country what we would call conservative). As we discussed the idea I told Jo that different people in America hold different perspectives of sex and traditional lifestyles. Again I reflected to a previous assumption I had gathered from our cultural exchange that the majority of negative stereotypes our country puts out to other countries come from Northern regions of American in major cities like New York and Chicago. I explained to Jo that for the most part the United States was broken into four main sectors the North, the Conservative South, the Midwest, and the far West. Jo and I came to the agreement that different people in every part of the world have vastly changing definitions of what is right or wrong, traditional or non-traditional, and what is ethical or unethical behavior. As we wrapped up our night we looked forward to moving on to Shanghai Normal University with our first real taste of Shanghai student life. 


10/1/2013 02:24:19 pm

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