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Yuyuan Garden, often called just Yu Garden, is Ming Era garden sourounded by a massave outdoor shopping complex. While in the day the gardens are nice at night the shopping and the lights are king. I will likley be returning to Yu Garden before I return home to the US in order to get souvineers and attempt to blow through thr last of my Chinese Yuan.
While we, the ECNU international students, love the Mao statue in actuality the structure ECNU prefers to represent it self with is its motto wall thing, apparently a somewhat common feature of Chinese universities. Many visitors, like the lady in my photo, love to take pictures of the motto as a sign they visited ECNU. So at some point early today or late last night, for me anyway, I hit then surpassed 1,000 views. My Jared in China blog is now officially the most sucussful thing I have ever done on the internet. To be perfictly honest, I was kind of expecting the only people who will ever read my blog would be my Mom and Dad, but it seems other people are actually reading it. In terms of internet blogs I think I am doing very well, as from what I here most blogs have no readers other than the author.
So I guess thanks all for reading my blog! I plan to basically change nothing and continue doing what I have been doing for the past twoish weeks. In my class Globalization and Urbanization: China's Urban Transformation and What it Means for the World Dr. Li Limei, associate professor in ECNU's Department of Sociology, and the class were discussing Chinese geography and arable land in China. According to the CIA World Factbook 11.3% of China's land is arable while China has an estimated 1,367,485,388 people; the in United States 16.8% of land is arable while the US has 321,368,864 people. Both the US and China have similar land areas, the US is slightly larger though. This means that China is a net importer of food, since they have to feed so many people with little usable land, while America is a net exporter of food, since the US does not have as many people as China and has more land for farming. According to the USDA the United States exports food mostly to middle income countries like China. US food exports sometimes include food Americans don't often eat. According to my Chinese friend, Yuxue, China imports a lot of bullfrog, a relatively common food in China but not in America, from the United States. I am not sure if this is a production thing, that the US produces enough bullfrogs for export, or it is a quality thing, the Chinese prefer American raised bullfrogs, as American products are seen as more trustworthy in China, but it is interesting none the less.
With everything that is good about a study abroad experience, like the food, there is also the bad. While my complaint may seem petty I have found that the Chinese internet is the most infuriating part of my experience so far. If very few of my friends were on Facebook I could live without it. If I grew up speaking Chinese I heard Baidu is totally comparable to Google in many respects. If I had to plan around "internet maintenance days" I could grow to deal with it. But the internet speeds in China are almost insultingly bad. After quickly Googling on Bing I came across Wikipedia's handy list of global internet speeds, "list of countries by internet connection speeds". The US has an average internet speed of 12.6mb/s according to the Wikipedia article. While Hong Kong SAR's internet speeds beet the US's at 15.8mb/s, mainland China's far lag behind with a slow 3.7mb/s. While I am assuming the mainland's average internet speeds is heeled back by some of the more rural parts of the country, the internet in Shanghai does not seem very fast from my personal experience. I feel truly sorry for the people of Venezuela and Bolivia who's connection speeds according to the article are 1.5mb/s and 1.8mb/s respectively. I also feel sorry for the South Korean students at ECNU who previously had a full 20.5mb/s use. If you are like many of the international students and try to add a VPN or a proxy server to the mix you can only pray that your connection is solid and fast enough to survive. So if I don't get to posting everyday or my posts seem a bit rushed, now you know why.
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AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
November 2021
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