late at night

One of the main buildings on our school's campus

It is already my fourth day in Xindu. I arrived on Wednesday to Chengdu, a big city 18 km away from Xindu. Hoeteck was already waiting there for me together with Director Chen. Director Chen turned out to be a rather young man, perhaps in his early thirties. His English is good so I can communicate with him without much difficulty.

Hoeteck and I were sent with a driver to the school while Director Chen stayed in Chengdu to wait for Xiang Xian who was to arrive several hours later from Shanghai. From the car, Chengdu looked like fairly big and reasonably developed Chinese city. Then we drove for a few kilometers through an area that looked rather rural: small gray poor houses, very narrow road, after that Xindu and the school.

School's swimming pool; polution makes the air a little bit hazy

The school looks nice and modern by comparison with the surroundings. It even has a large swimming pool (much larger than the MIT pool). The buildings look relatively modern and pretty. At the same time, the classrooms are extremely simple. Just chairs and desks and a blackboard; no teaching aids or other luxuries.

The school decided to put us up in one of the free apartments on campus. It is a boarding school so besides dorms for students it also has plenty of housing for teachers and staff and, indeed, many of them end up leaving on campus. When we first entered the apartment, we noticed the large leaving area, two bedrooms, a toilet, a kitchen and a bathroom. But afterwards we discovered that a little yard step out onto through our back door belonged only to us and in a building across the yard we found another bathrooms, a washing room complete with a washing machine and a small guest room. Totally luxurious conditions. We even have an air conditioning unit here!

Xindu, hmm, Xindu is a different story... The main road that passes right outside of the school's gate is very wide and gray and full of extremely chaotic traffic. It seems that cars, trucks, bicycles and tricycles can come from any direction at any time, although they do try to stick to the right hand side. Most of the shops are located on the first floors of buildings in niches that look like car garages: same shape, only a little bit bigger and with metal gate. After the gate is pulled up, the entrance to a shop is totally open: no shop windows, no doors. Slightly further away from our school something like a more modern or more prosperous part of the town begins. Shops there look more like those found in the west than those near our school. Interestingly, although there are plenty of shops, eating places, barber shops, etc., we couldn't find any "hang-out" places like bars, cafes and the like.

A pretty sight on campus

In the absence of the kind of night entertainment that we are used to in the Europe, Xindu has some other attractions. First of all, there is a large variety of food vendors on the streets. Hoeteck especially fell in love with one kind of food, which is supposedly very typical for this area. I forgot its name but it looks like small shish kebobs. They are grilled on the spot with a huge amount of spice. Very tasty and very cheap. I have had some today as well.