Meeting with the Chinese students

9/3

Today we woke up bright and early at 6:30 (which we will for the rest of this week). No one was really hungry for breakfast this morning.
We hopped on the bus for our 40 minute ride to Shandong University of Art and Design’s new campus (we are staying on the older part because it is loser to downtown Jinan). We arrived to finally meet the students we will be working with over the next week. They all were very excited and very friendly and polite. A few spoke a decent English and most spoke enough to communicate a little bit. I felt bad that we didn’t know a little more Chinese but I think they were excited to practice English (they start learning it in elementary school).
I worked on communicating with a few different students though small words and drawing on a piece of paper. I showed them some stuff on my computer and they seemed to like it. We were shown a presentation of what some of their grad students had created and it was all really awesome. I was quite intimidated.
Our first project was just drawing on a long piece of butcher paper a bunch of sketches of our impression of China so far. Then their students would add to our drawings and make some more of their own. All in all it was a lot of fun and very interesting in trying to communicate.
The three hours we all spent together went by very quickly and then we separated to go have lunch. We ate in some separate rooms next to their large cafeteria that smelled really good. For lunch we had a couple more interesting items include fish with their heads and tails still on and octopus (which were both really good).
We came back and toured their campus museum’s collection of very old Shandong pieces. Afterwards we finally had our first break since off the train and instead of taking a nap like I should have, Drew, Tim, Edwin and I walked around downtown. Drew wanted to find some trendy shirts but it was difficult to find men’s clothing anywhere. There were an abundance of women’s clothing shops, but very few men’s.
For dinner we went out to a buffet. I was expecting it to be fairly sketchy, like most buffets in the states, but it was really nice. None of us were very hungry (as usual) but still we ate. Near the end of the meal we were poured glasses of beer and our host (a man named Jackie that is the head of the foreign exchange program at Shandong University of Art and Design) would toast and say “gam pei!” which means “bottoms up”. Immedeately after we had finished they were refilled and another person we were dining with shouted “Gam pei!” and we drank again. This continued for some time and most of us couldn’t drink any more because our stomachs were already full of food and then filled to the top with beer. The Chinese like their guests to be full of food and then full of beer, they say, “it makes people happy”, they were right. It was a blast. We got back to the dorms at about 9:30 and crashed hard!