On Tuesday was our first day in the Beijing Polytechnic College. We had to get up quite early, because at 8 o’clock was the beginning of the first class. After waking up we went to buy two baguettes (8 Yuan (1,10€) each) and some butter, so we would have some kind of a breakfast. At 8 o’clock we met with Zhu & Li, who told us that we would have breakfast now in the canteen. OK, so double breakfast, no problem. At the canteen we had some dumplings which were quite nice and a „drink“, which was more like soup. But this soup/drink was not very delicious, we had to leave it there when we left.
Afterwards we had English class. There were about 25 students and one teacher, speaking to the teacher was very nice, because her English was very good. We learned that her husband is Canadian and she has two children, and that she doesn’t have a drivers licence for her scooter. Speaking to someone with very good English skills was very relaxing, speaking to Li & Zhu is always a little bit exhausting. In class we did a bit of a question & answer, the teacher and some students asked us various questions, about ourselves as well about Germany. We had the opportunity to ask in return and learned a bit about the Chinese new year festival (Spring festival) and tried to learn some of their names. To be honest, I don’t remember any of them. The English level of the pupils was ranging from quite good with only a little Chinese accent to not very good with a strong Chinese accent. Nevertheless we got around and had two interesting classes of English (each 45 minutes).
The next two classes were something which Li & Zhu called „Psychology“. Lukas and I think it’s more like social studies. We were in a big hall with about 50 students, in front on a stage was a teacher speaking ~200 Chinese words per minute, supported by a PowerPoint presentation. From some pictures and movies she showed we could guess that the subject of this class was something like „How to make friends“. Although we did not understand much, it was a funny class and we tried our best to participate…
Afterwards we had lunch in the canteen. We ate rice with chicken in a very delicious sauce, and it cost only 10 Yuan (1,50€).
Since we had one hour to eat, it was no problem to wait a bit for the food, because of the many students who all wanted to eat. Filled with rice and chicken we had our last two classes. It was a little bit like the CCNA lessons at the OSZIMT, we had a network shown and we should build it up on real devices. Afterwards we set up the interfaces and configured IPsec VPN and some other security features. But we didn’t work on the console line, we used the web interface to configure everything.
As the last point we watched some basketball games at the basketball field of the school. It were students playing „street basketball“ against each other, and we could relax a bit in the sun.
After dinner (beef noodles, very delicious) we discovered a shopping mall called Lotte Mart. It is not far away from the school and we believe that you get everything there. There are two floors filled with groceries, electronics and clothes. The prices are very low, so next time we need something we will first check there, if they don’t have it it might not even exist 😉