Random Thoughts

1. One of the foreign faculty is a history buff and a photographer.  He has photographed over 57,000 photos of the ancient world. (www.garyleetodd.com)
2. One of the foreign faculty (from Ohio) has 7 children and they all practice Kung Fu. They performed at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics
3. Every freshmen student has to take military training and they march around campus every day.
4. Some of the toilet facilities accommodate men and women together. And this only adds to my stress of using swat toilets.
5. The foreign faculty is forbidden to talk to the students about religion.
6. The foreign faculty holds a religious service on Sunday nights and the students are forbidden to come to the faculty dorm at that time.
7. The foreign faculty were allowed to reschedule their classes on Thanksgiving Day and they were allowed to cook a tradition meal together.  However, it was a little hard to find turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin, and various other traditional foods.
8. Three forbidden topics:  Tibet, Taiwan, and religion.   And any discussion about Tienanmen Square is so forbidden that it is not even on the list of forbidden topics.
9. The Communist Party Secretary has an office right in the administration office.
10. This university is affiliated with Fort Hayes University in Kansas which is mostly an on-line college.  Several of the Sias students go there for graduate school, looking for the ultimate study abroad program.  I wonder if they are disappointed when they step off that plane and see the great expansion of the mid-west farm lands.
11. There isn't quite the police force here in my city as there is in Beijing.  But I do see video cameras in very odd places.
12. The campus is designed to represent the world. So we have Italian Square, German Street, French Street, Moscow Square and the castle.  Sometimes I feel as if I am walking around Disneyland.  Feel free to take a look at the website (www.siasuniversity.cn) but I have to throw out a little disclaimer, all of the photos have been greatly enhanced through Photoshop.  I am not on the campus that is displayed through the photos.
13. The president of the university built himself a huge mansion.  It reminds me of Monticello.  And it stays empty most of the time since he spends most of his time in California.  But when he is on campus, he stays in the dorm with us.  He stays at the end of my hallway and sneaks in and out through the back stairway.
14. Every student on this campus is learning English.  That’s 24,000 students saying hello to me every day.
15. When I walk the streets, the local people stare at me.  Sometimes, parents and grandparents will bring their children over to me to shake their hands because they have never seen a foreigner before and they want to talk with me. And when I open my mouth and speak in English, they laugh hysterically, as if my sounds are the funniest sounds they have ever heard.