Doing business at SEU

by Matt Dela Peña

BA-355: Doing Business in China was more a spontaneous endeavor for me than a well-thought-out decision. The moment I heard that there was going to be a contingent of students from my school going to China over the summer, I needed to be a part of it. Ultimately, I managed to convince my parents that this trip was highly pivotal for my major, and I was able to go.^^ So here's a broad description of what we did.

In the first two weeks, we stayed in the city of Nanjing and took "intensive" courses at Southeast University. According to the internet, SEU enrolled roughly over 40,000 kids for the current school year. That's a student body well over ten times bigger than our own. The school comprises of three campuses spread throughout the city. The one we attended was Sipailou, the main campus.

Our first day of classes was on a Tuesday. To get to our classroom that morning (and every morning thereafter), we literally had to survive the walk between our hotel and the International building. Typically, all we had to do was dodge the mopeds that kept trying to run us over. On one occasion, however, the streets became flooded by a monsoon. Good thing I brought flip flops.

In the unlikely event that we made it to class alive, we attended two lectures daily: Chinese Language and International Business Communication. While these lectures weren't exactly the greatest highlights of our stay, we learned a ton of crucial Chinese phrases that kept us fed and gained a ton of insight on the workings behind Chinese business practices and culture.

This is probably the worst and least appetizing example ever. Sorry, SEU.

Our group ate lunch and dinner almost always at the canteen. SEU gave each one of us a declining balance card which you used to buy food with but which, due to some impeccable accounting, didn't have enough funds to last any of us for the entire two weeks. They gave us more money though.

But don't get me wrong. Each meal costed roughly 6 RMB ($1), which gave you a crap ton of rice and two sides of your choice.

Although severely lacking in presentation (it was served on prison metal plates), the food was damn good. In fact, I would even say that I preferred it over some of the meals that we had in the actual restaurants around the campus.

Additionally, the canteen's second floor served other stuff like dumplings, chow mien, and steak. At first, I was hesitant to eat there because (1) I couldn't read the menus and (2) I couldn't order in Chinese. But after a whiff of common sense, I eventually realized that I could have simply pointed at something on the menu and got what I wanted.

Sometimes, it's fun to get lost.

Nearly everyday after lunch, we had one hour to kill before heading off to an excursion, which I've given examples of in previous posts. But if we didn't go anywhere, we either chilled around campus, played basketball with some local students, or explored the city. We definitely tried to make the most out of our two week stay by walking around Nanjing. My favorite spot in the city was 1912.

In the end, pioneering Pacific University's newest summer travel course was not as easy a task as I had expected, nor was I even the slightest bit prepared for any of the circumstances I encountered throughout the trip. As someone from a small, suburban-borderline-rural school, it definitely took some time getting used to life on an urban setting, not to mention one in a completely different country.

Yet, although I'm making it sound like I had a pretty rough time, in actuality, jumping into the many unfamiliar trials we, as a group, faced throughout our stay resulted in what was perhaps the most rewarding set of outcomes I, as a self-christened new traveler, could have ever ask for.