A tour of Nankai University

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We've been communicating with our Chinese student counterparts for several months now.

I finally got to meet my counterpart Yiling in person today. It was very exciting. She's a sociology major who's doing her undergraduate thesis on homosexuality throughout Chinese history. And her English is phenomenal. It put me to shame!

She knew that I liked Chinese poetry (though my knowledge is limited). So she gave me this fan with a famous poem written on the back. Unfortunately I was able to decipher about 20% of it. She helped me through a few sentences, but we never managed to finish the whole thing.


Here she is with her friend Fang Ping, who is working with my roommate.


I also took a tour of Nankai University. Only parts of the campus which was started in 1918 survived the WWII bombings, so a lot of it was re-built after wards. There's a lot of Soviet influence in the buildings.

Nankai's Bell


This is their gym. It's massive. I've been told there is a full indoor track and swimming pool.


Student canteen. Holy smokes, it was three stories!


The campus has quit a lot of waterways and lakes around it.


This is one row of many, many, many student dorms and professor's apartments. The closer ones are the older dorms built several decades ago. The further ones are only ten years old.


The older dorms didn't have bathrooms in them. So students have to walk across the street to the bathhouse. Yikes.


This is their student library.



Dryers aren't very popular in China. There were clothes hung up on lines everywhere. Here's how they dry their bedding.


I didn't realize how many pictures I had until I started posting.

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