Day 1

The flight over was miserable especially the 13 hour flight from Chicago to Tokyo. We had to stay on the plane an extra hour after we landed because they had to check everyone's paperwork to make sure no one had the swine flu. I then waited in Tokyo airport for 4 hours. I think I slept for an hour of that. The flight from Tokyo to Beijing I slept the whole time, which was about 4 hours. I arrived on Tsinghua campus as 11 pm their time and checked into my room at about 11:30. I hadn't really seen much of China yet because I went straight to bed when I got in.

The next morning we had our first lecture. This lecture was about the history and culture of China and it was given to us by Fang Zhaohui. There were some interesting topics he discussed such as the history of China, some major events that have taken place, the communist government, the Chinese world view, and their language.

After the lecture each student got paired up with a Tsinghua student and we got a tour of the campus. I was paired with a girl but I don't remember her name. She was a communications major and spoke very well English. We first got to go to a dining hall that was four stories high and eat lunch with our student. It took me a while to pick out what I wanted for lunch because there were many different choices. After eating lunch I realized that Chinese food in China isn't really that much like Chinese food in America. Real Chinese food is much more bland that American Chinese food. After we ate, then came the tour. She took me to the oldest part of campus that had the traditional Chinese artitecture. This part of campus was beautiful. They had parks, ponds, flowers, and lots of greenery. It was much more prettier than any other campus I have ever seen. The campus is also a whole lot bigger than Purdue. Everyone here rides bikes all over because it's too far to walk to places.

After the tour, we had a couple hours of free time then it was off to dinner. We ate at a Tai restaurant called Banana Leaf. This was a restaurant where there were some singers and dancers and people playing intruments to entertain the people eating. It was a pretty cheese place. They brought out our food in big servings and everyone ate out of the servings. The singers ended up getting our whole group up dancing in the restaurant. It was pretty funny and interesting. After dinner I went back to the room because I was exhausted and went to bed.