By Max Morley, Class of 2013
Switching location from Shanghai to Xi'an brought with it many interesting changes: the traffic here is, believe it or not, even crazier than it was in Shanghai; the street vendors seem to have nicer wares; the definition of "ancient" has shifted from 100 years old to 3000 years old, and we are actually seeing historical buildings.
Whether it can be attributed to all these changes or to my own mistakes, one thing cannot be denied - I got lost. On our trip to Xi'an International Students University, we got to hear Dr. Hua lecture on the current and future state of US-China relations. Following the lecture was a short question-and-answer session. After it all ended, a Chinese student named Rain (yes, Rain) approached me about my question concerning environmental concerns in China. We spoke for about 10 minutes on the subject, when suddenly I realized that all my classmates, Dr. Hua, and the Associate Dean of the school had all left. I rushed outside, hoping to see them waiting on me, but had no such luck. It quickly dawned on me that I was now alone, without a cell phone, on a campus I had never been to surrounded by hundreds of people that most likely do not speak my language.
I had multiple options. I had the room key, so I could take a taxi back to the hotel and wait. I could run around searching for the room they had gone to for the second lecture by Associate Dean Li. Eventually, I chose instead to spend the four hours (yes, four hours) until we were supposed to leave exploring the campus.
XISU was a fascinating place. I wanted this blog to highlight some of the differences that I perceived between our campus culture and theirs, and some of the things I learned on my four-hour journey.
I may have missed our second lecture, but I feel as though I learned a great deal on my own in those four hours. It was a bit annoying, but, in retrospect, I loved it.
Max Morley, from Pikeville, Ky., is a senior McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville and is currently studying in the People's Republic of China. He is majoring in political science.
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| Max Morley University of Louisville |
Whether it can be attributed to all these changes or to my own mistakes, one thing cannot be denied - I got lost. On our trip to Xi'an International Students University, we got to hear Dr. Hua lecture on the current and future state of US-China relations. Following the lecture was a short question-and-answer session. After it all ended, a Chinese student named Rain (yes, Rain) approached me about my question concerning environmental concerns in China. We spoke for about 10 minutes on the subject, when suddenly I realized that all my classmates, Dr. Hua, and the Associate Dean of the school had all left. I rushed outside, hoping to see them waiting on me, but had no such luck. It quickly dawned on me that I was now alone, without a cell phone, on a campus I had never been to surrounded by hundreds of people that most likely do not speak my language.
I had multiple options. I had the room key, so I could take a taxi back to the hotel and wait. I could run around searching for the room they had gone to for the second lecture by Associate Dean Li. Eventually, I chose instead to spend the four hours (yes, four hours) until we were supposed to leave exploring the campus.
XISU was a fascinating place. I wanted this blog to highlight some of the differences that I perceived between our campus culture and theirs, and some of the things I learned on my four-hour journey.
- Dorm life anywhere is not a luxurious one - cramped spaces, potentially terrible roommates, and heating/cooling systems that may or may not work. However, every dorm at XISU appeared to have a balcony, and a spacious one, at that. In addition, the size of the rooms (from what I could tell) appeared to be slightly larger than you'd expect a dorm room to be. The other specifications are still unknown to me.
- Outside the dorms, many students had laid out colorful blankets and were having what appeared to be sorts of yard sales. Used textbooks, clothing, and decor lined the sheets, with the students sitting behind them offering them for sale in a fashion much less aggressive and much more tolerable than that of street vendors. One textbook that I vividly remember seeing had a picture of Barack Obama on the cover, under which, it said in Chinese and an English translation, "A Real American Hero."
- Fun fact - their student center is attached to their clock tower, too.
- Their buildings really played tricks on you. For one, they looked massive, but, once inside, feel much smaller. Also, several buildings which looked crummy and beaten down from the outside looked very impressive on the inside, and other buildings that seemed magnificent (the library and the administration building, for example) were boring, plain, and sometimes downright dirty inside.
- I observed the students around campus, and noticed that there seemed to be a great deal more females than males on campus. Once I finally reunited with our group, I asked the Assoc. Dean about this, and he informed me that the population of XISU is ~80% female.
- The entrance to the campus was marked by two large half-monuments of sorts, both of which had an interesting mixture of the Roman Composite order columns and classical Greek entablatures. I'm not sure if this is a common mixture, or if it was someone trying to be fancy at the school gates and messing up.
- At one point, early into the four hours when I still had hope of finding the group, I was sitting in the room, hoping they would come looking for me in the only place we had been on campus. During that time, I read the only piece of material I had with me - my Passport. If you haven't read every single word in that thing, I suggest you do. It's a pretty interesting read, especially when you're painfully bored, alone, and it's all you have. Necessity breeds ingenuity.
- At somewhere around the middle of the four hours, I was sitting by the canteen (where the students go to eat) and two Chinese students approached me and asked if they could sit. They were both from Xi'an, were first-years at XISU, were studying Japanese, and hadn't spoken any significant amount of English in over a year. It was a really exciting conversation, not only because of that, but because I got to learn a lot about what it is like to go to school there and school life in general in China.
I may have missed our second lecture, but I feel as though I learned a great deal on my own in those four hours. It was a bit annoying, but, in retrospect, I loved it.
Max Morley, from Pikeville, Ky., is a senior McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville and is currently studying in the People's Republic of China. He is majoring in political science.