Nanjing University

Meant to post this Saturday, but got distracted:

I've been in Nanjing for just over three weeks and already am having trouble coming up with what to write about.

So here's some basic information about Nanjing University courtesy of Wikipedia.

Nanjing Daxue
Nanjing University has existed in some form since the third century A.D. It became China's first modern university in the 1920's and was given it's current name in 1949.

It's a public university with 12,200 undergraduates, 9,900 post graduates, and 3,000 faculty. There is a suburban campus for underclassmen and an urban campus mostly for seniors and graduate students. I'm on the urban campus, and it's like 30 minutes to an hour on a bus to get to the other campus.

There's a long list of scholars that have graduated from here, but if you're not Chinese, you probably haven't heard of any of them. Most notably, Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Guomindang and the president of the People's Republic of China (the ones who fled to Taiwan), served as president of the university for 2 years when it relocated to Chongqing during the Japanese invasion.

Going to the Canting
Near the center of campus there is the huge student cafeteria, that's at least 4 stories tall and has at least 3 dining halls in it. I went to the lower level canting, because I know how it works. I'd never been there during the lunch rush though. It was completely packed with students, and with all the other people I saw converging on the place, there had to be thousands of students making use of the building at that time.





People during the lunch rush. This line was stretched out for a long ways.








I got a plate of noodles with a fried egg, some greens and very sparse beef for 5 kuai ($0.75). It's probably one of the least expensive things there, but it is more than enough to fill me up.

Right outside the cafeteria there were all these thermoses (plural?) lined up because the dorms don't have hot water so they have to come get a thermos and fill up. I actually have to give a 5 minute speech in Chinese about the difference between our international student dorms and the Chinese student dorms. It's due in about 12 hours, and I haven't started. The lack of hot water is just one of the differences. The largest difference is that many of the dorm rooms have 7 people in them. Maybe after I write my speech I'll write more about the differences (one being how

I'll update again tomorrow about my weekend exploits.




Thermoses. It was impossible to get enough in a shot to give you an idea of how many of these things there were.