Shanghai Death Race!

Alright. Our drivers here in Shanghai are completely insane. We have two mini buses to take us around while we are here and the drivers like to race. Crikey. Our drive back to SAI this evening was like a death race. We all held on for dear life, and more than a few yells of "oh my @&^#*" were heard on the way. Let's just say that what was expected to be a two hour ride turned into a 70 minute one. Yikes. The bus I was in "won"...

The objective of our bus ride was to get us to Suzhou today. Suzhou is about two hours outside of Shanghai (depends who's driving though!) and is described as an "earthly paradise". It is a city and industrial park built in a perfectly planned and ultra modern style. The ultimate in manufactured landscapes without so much as a blade of grass out of place. New, new, new. I found it to be incredibly surreal with its army of gardeners and watchful eye of surveillance cameras.

In Suzhou we paid a visit to the Xi'an Jiantong-Liverpool University (XJTLU). This new University, opened in 2006, is a joint venture between Xi'an Jiantong University and Liverpool University, and has already achieved 1st tier National University status here in China. Its focus is to provide the overseas educational experience to China's top students at home in China. They achieve by aggressively recruiting top international faculty and students from around the world. They have established six research centres, among which is the finance, management & urbanization studies research centre, who we were guests of today. One of the topics discussed was their management teaching method MBAR2. I found this method to be of interest and it appears to parallel our learnings in the University of Alberta MBA program, with a focus on results based management, use of a case-based approach, and management by objectives.

We were treated to a view of the architectural plans for the complete XJTLU campus, which is under rapid construction. It is amazing. As I mentioned, the school has only been in existence since 2006 but there are already several beautiful buildings comprising its campus with many more in stages of completion. This is a major difference between Canadian and Chinese University infrastructure... It takes us many years to go through the process of getting a new building, but they can build an entire grand campus in under five years. We were also treated by XJTLU to one of the most delicious lunches we've had... we were guessing much of the time what the dishes were, but found them all to be great. We later learned that dishes included jellyfish (which we thought was some sort of vegetable), sea cucumber (thought it was eggplant in sauce), and eels (thought it looked unusual but had no clue... maybe sardine?)! We had no idea these item could be so delicious.

Well, the sandman beckons... bye for now.