AMP Treatise

Week two ended for us today, or actually yesterday for Section II since we have Friday off. Some sections have mornings off, or afternoons off, but we basically have a full day of class Mon-Thurs and all of Friday off. Except, of course, Friday morning was when my room was scheduled to be cleaned. There are maids that come around every two weeks and give the bathroom a once over. What luck I had when she came knocking at 9am this morning. I was forced to send her away in the interest of my continued sleep, which shows where my priorities are, I guess.

Business Writing and Presentations
This two week class ended for us on Tuesday when we had a 1,500 word report due on cultural differences between countries. We had four options (none including easy ones like the US or China) and had to write a recommendation to an imaginary client firm on the cultural and business differences between cultures. I chose the Sweden/Thailand option. Being Swedish, this should have been easier than the others, except for the fact that I've never actually lived there. Anyway, the purpose was not really on the content but on effective report writing. This wasn't as big a deal for me as it was the Chinese since this was probably one of the first business reports many of them have had to do.

Saturday morning we have to give a presentation on one of four topics, ours being Shanghai Tourism.

Food
The food here is fantastic, and I'm not even talking about the city of Shanghai. Next to the cafeteria there is a small restaurant which goes by many names (cafe, canteen, fandian, canting, and strangely, cafeteria). They have soda, bottled water, coffee, beer, and wine. But most importantly they have a great Chinese food menu and also a small Western food menu. The Western stuff is hamburgers, pasta, salads, etc. The usual suspects. That's good when you really get sick of cafeteria food. But the far better option is the Chinese food, and this isn't the General Tso's kind. I've basically been eating there for lunch and dinner (except for the occasions we go off campus) everyday. My current favorites are the stir fried beef with spicy green peppers, spicy chicken with nuts, and spicy tofu chili (cubes of tofu with some ground beef in a red sauce, called ma pu dou fu). Notice a theme there? We usually get a group of people together and order several dishes and the total usually comes out to about 15-20RMB, or about US$2. This is really unbeatable.

Economics
This is the one class I didn't comment on last time, and well, not much to comment on except that unlike the other classes this is your regular old microeconomics class. If you've never taken an economics class before what this entails is imagining situations that never happen in life and applying theory to understand them. What I mean by this is that you have to make assumptions like:

• Assuming nothing changes in a situation
• Assuming people are omnicient
• Everyone always acts rationally

In english, what would the price of wheat be if technology never changes, people consume the same amount all the time, and pigs could fly. Not that the class itself is bad but just basic microeconomics! All you angry economists can email me your strong worded responses to the email address on the left of this page.

Group meetings
Like I said, all the international students are split up evenly among the Chinese classmates. Really, I wouldn't have it any other way, but there is some frustration here. The cultures are so different that inevitably there are difficulties. Some students have adapted better than others. One guy in particular, went into his group meetings and was direct, opinionated, lacking in compromise, and pushed really hard to do things his way. The end result was not pretty. Its much more about consensus building, which can take far longer than I'm use to doing things back at home. But that's what all us international students are in China to learn. What I have learned is how incredibly motivated and smart the Chinese students are, though. They really go out of their way. The problem is that if you can accomplish something in one hour, they say to themselves, this can't be that easy, we haven't worked hard enough, we have to keep working on it for 3 more hours. So that's the level of work ethic we're dealing with here. They do work really hard all the time but sometimes not the most efficiently. And not that I had low expectations, but they continue to impress me with the way they think and they're creativity. Once they are in small groups, they somehow become far more creative than they do when in a classroom.