Getting started in China

March 21, 2007

Today, I am only reporting that I survived the flights - MSP to Chicago, Chicago to Beijing, pretty much straight over the top, then Beijing to Hangzhou. I lost track of the actual travel and awake time somehow, and I’m more jet lagged than I’ve ever been, but I think it was something like 29 hours. All I know for sure is – it’s tomorrow here! Back in the day we’d say someone was so far out they were half way into next week, and now I know what it feels like.

It’s sort of disorienting as a pure baby boomer that grew up practicing hiding under grade school desks, to watch the airplane animation on the video screen as it flies over Siberia and into China. The only things we saw like that in the fifties and sixties involved other kinds of planes. In spite of the unsettled condition of our world, it can be more unsettled than this!

Many of you remember Dr. Ma Yin Liang’s visit to St. Olaf just two years ago this semester – he invited me to do this exchange over a year ago, but I got the actual flu last winter just before it was scheduled and we postponed it until now.

Ironically, I got a very bad cold right before this trip and I feel sort of like a garbage truck ran over me, then came back to see what that bump was, and got me again. Going onto the plane with all kinds of junk going on in my chest I thought about the “Alien” movies and wondered if anyone would be alive when we landed; a lot of people are going to feel crummy in a few days!

Zhejiang University is 47,000 students, and 15,000 faculty and staff. There are five campuses in and around Hangzhou, and the newest is about six years old. It is something like 15,000,000 square feet of space. That’s like building maybe the entire University of Iowa at once, and it’s also why our concrete, steel, copper, and other construction supplies are so expensive here today. Most of the Portland cement is made here, there, you know, the US - and shipload after shipload is heading to here, China, constantly. Dr. Ma says that construction is slowing on the new campus and that they’ll only start 100,000 square METERs this year. That’s half of St. Olaf and it’s a slow year!

The last two years Yin Liang has been working on a sale of one of the older campuses for redevelopment and he just closed that deal yesterday before I arrived – some 2,400,000 of Chinese Yuan. Exchange is about .14, but it’s still serious money!

Today - I’m writing at 10:00 PM your time, but it's 11:00 AM tomorrow here - I make a presentation to Dr. Ma’s staff, tour the campus a bit, then have a dinner with one or more of the university vice presidents.

Pictures will come later - there's something messing up the uploads and I need a little kid to help me figure it out!