Authors: Marthe Doornbos & Babette Mattheüs
Dear reader
Before you start reading a little note: everything in this story is based on facts and mostly expressed in numbers.
After 4 hours of sleep we had to go at 8 o’clock in the morning rush of the Beijing metro system. Just to give you an overview of the morning rush, we tried to count the Chinese people in the coupe and with the formula of 4log8^10, this results in 4576,5 Chinese, but don’t forget the 21 blue colored TU/e students!
On our way to the University, we got a little lost, because of a discussion about which direction the sun is rising, and if Peking differs from home. At 9 o’clock we got a warm welcome from professor Xudong Yang, who works for Tsinghua University, the University which we where visiting. Five inspiring presentation from Chinees phd students where giving to us. The situation in the room during the presentation: amount of sleeping Chinees: 6, amount of dutch students fighting against the sleep but still awake: 21.
Between the presentations the entire room was measured. Just to give you an overview: Chinees which where bothered with 15 hard englisch sentence which had to be written down for the speechintelligible, 3 dutch student who were hanging outside the window trying to measure some particles and 4 students who were made an attempt to keep the light outside while measuring the lighting inside.
After an inspiring speech of Dr. Xiaobin Liu from the Oake ridge national laboratory in the VS about heat pumps we were indulged with an amazing lunch. This lunch gave strength for a long walk, read 8 km, around the University campus. For us this was a whole new experience with a real green strip. Chinese people spend there budget of 1.6 miljon, not on renovating and innovation buildings but on parks, waterfalls, fountains, canals and grass. These facilities can al be found in the University campus. Just to give you another overview, the green maintaince reveals in, per cubic meter grass, of 4 mowing Chinese and 2 assistants who collect the grass garbage. With grass sides of 56087 m2 you can imagine the influence of this strategy on the unemployment rates.
In order to not forget the dutch standards, dinner was surved at 17:30. Because our Chinees specialist thought we were going to be starved our dinner existed, to give you an overview, off: 36 kilo rice, 6 loempia’s, 3 inside-out soupballs and 12 dumplings. Off course nobody finished there plaid, the food was send to the food bank for the by orphans abandoned puppies.
After our last supper in Beijing, we left with the strategy of throwing our luggage in the metro. A few still struggled and were left behind at the station. After being reunited, we carried our luggage up the not-tourist-friendly stairs, just for your imagination; 345 steps. If you thought we had a crowd putting on traditional Chinese clothing, you should have seen us, waiting at the train station playing cards and football.
Currently, we arrived at a new city, Tianjing, were we where welcomed by a Chinees young men, whom we still not fully trust, but eventually took us to our new hostel were we ended the day with a cold beverage.
