Shandong University Campus Life (山東大學)

Today's lecture was fairly late so we decided to explore Weihai a little more. Walking along the beach for a while, we managed to find a fairly large garden with large stones, small fireman gnomes, and benches in the colours of the rainbow. But the surprising thing, in a city of over 2 million, we were completely alone in this garden. Even the ocean (which, I'm sure that I've mentioned that it's truly freezing over here) had a few people swimming in it.

I had a logic lecturer once who explained to us: it would make him gloriously happy to be called to the directors office for passing everybody, and to be able to slam the exams on his desk and show him that we all learnt the material. Well, in China apparently they've got things already worked out. Here, 5% of the class fails. Whether you want it to or not. Anything higher or lower than that is regarded as an "academic accident" and is the fault of the lecturer.

But the campus is amazing in terms of the number of people wandering around. We found ourselves somewhere between the student dorms and the lecture theatres when the lunch break was over, and decided to follow the flow. We ran into a street which looked like it was currently hosting the entire population of my own university. And as we followed into one of the buildings, a bell rang and you could see everybody suddenly picking up the pace and running the last few metres into their corresponding rooms. Whether this bell should have stayed in my High-School days or not, it was at least sweet.

The smog cleared up a little bit though, and let a little bit more sunlight down here, and a little bit more heat. We went up to the observatory and got to admire the view all the way silhouetted hills (the camera had to stay at the bottom of the daunting hill unfortunately). Up there, we ran into what my friend describes as "a grandma". They're old, smile from ear to ear, and always seem to be there, no matter where you are.
We have also already checked that you can at least see a few of the really bright stars out during the night, so hopefully we actually get to look inside the observatory a little bit.

Tomorrow I get to practice my english again as I attempt to help people with more Haskell. I somehow expect I'm going to be teaching more about how to 'cd' in the command line, but we shall see. Apparently the students were happy with us, as my own spy friend told me, so that's something.