Hello my name is Mikolaj Geritz. I’m an international student from Rollins College and for the next couple of months I will share with you, my dear readers about my experiences in Shanghai during the Rollins in Shanghai program.
It is important to mention that I have been preparing for this trip a lot during my summer vacation. I spent my days filling up documents necessary for my visa, and repeating my Chinese classes in order to have at least basic language skills here, since only some people here speak english. I also filled out the remaining parts of my application for the “Alliance for Global Education”, which is a main organizer of this trip. During my time here I hope to improve greatly my language skills and make a lot of new friends in the process. I also hope to learn about the International Business, which is my Major, from the perspective of China
I left my home country of Poland on August 23 and I arrived in this city a day later at 10 am in the morning. At first I was greatly surprised how the weather here is as warm as in Rollins during Summer but I’ve gotten used to it pretty quickly. I took a taxi and arrived at SUFE 2 hours later where I meet my new roommate Kevin who’s a student of SUFE. I also met up with my friends from Rollins and together we had lunch. After that I bought myself a Chinese Sim card so that I can have contact with others. Later we explored the university and got to know other people from different universities who also joined the Alliance program. That night we all had dinner at a traditional Chinese restaurant, where I discovered that Chinese share all the dishes and there is no ordering of singular dishes for a single person. The next day we had the orientation of the program and we got to go to dinner with our roommates in order to spend some time with them and get to know each other better. Mine, however was unable to participate since he had some family problems, but he arranged that we have dinner with other students. It was a very interesting experience, since it was my first time eating at a hot pot restaurant. The next day we took a placement test which decided at which Chinese classes would we end up at. On that day we continued with our orientation and in the evening we saw a Chinese Acrobat Show which was incredible. That day, was also the first time that I got to see the famous view of the Shanghai Skyscrapers. On Saturday we went sightseeing as a group to the Urban planning center of Shanghai where we learned the history of the development of China, and we got to see The Shanghai International Medical Zone, a famous facility that specializes in medical research. Finally on Sunday the orientation ended with us getting assigned to our specific classes and we got to meet our Chinese course teachers. I also found out about the Chinese style of teaching which is pretty hard. I’ll see how I handle it in the upcoming months.
On this statement I’ll end my first blog entry. Please expect the next one within the next 2 weeks.