Today is the 18th of September. Today we left at 8:15 to travel to the Fudan University. This university was founded in 1905 and has four campuses. We started with an introduction about the university. About 26000 students now attend this university of which is 20% is a foreign student. Fudan university is listed in the top three schools in China. After this short introduction we got a lab tour. We got split up in two groups to be able to visit the labs. The first lab was about making waveguides for optical purposes. In this lab there was an active laser with many mirrors but unfortunately there was no warning sign to alert us to this fact. In the second lab there were optical devices. After the Chinese students gave us a tour trough their labs we went on to the museum of this university. It was quite impressive that a university has his own museum. The text was of course all in Chinese which made it very difficult for us to understand the history. What surprised me the most was a bachelor certificate from 1925 completely written in English! The museum also thought us that women were already allowed to go to this university in 1927. The museum had a second floor which we skipped since it would be to much information in Chinese so it would be boring for us. We walked all together to the cafeteria of the university for lunch. The cafeteria had two floors which is not surprising since 26000 students are attending this university and the dorms don't have any kitchen. The meal was pretty good.
After we finished our visit at the university we went on to the company visit of the day to EATON.
At EATON we got a brief introduction about the company. The main goal of this company is to help others manage their power in a sustainable energy efficient way. After their presentation Wouter gave his presentation about why we were in China. We all know this presentation too well by now:p Once all the formalities were done we went to the lab in the basement. What we noticed about the lab was that it was very neat and organized. The lab was also very new. A few engineers were working here at the time but in the future there should be more going on in the lab. Once we saw everything we went to the experience center to see their actual products. Which contained of valves and circuit breakers. What stood out in this exhibition was a golf club. This was displayed because a company they took over for the valves also used this material for the grip of the golf clubs. We ended the visit with a group picture in front of the EATON logo.
For dinner today we divided ourselves into little groups. I myself went with six other to a street more remote to have some local food. We really had a delicious dinner before we went to the last event of the night which was the acrobatic show. We all enjoyed this show very much. The show elements ranged from ballet to juggling with hats to climbing a tower of chairs and building human towers. After the show finished we took a picture with the crew. Hopefully we can once upload this picture. The age of the performers ranged from 10 till 30!! the little ones were already very good! The show ended at nine so we had some spare time left. Some went back to the hostels others stayed in the city. Some went to visit a garden but unfortunately it was already closed! This is it for today.
Laurie Overbeek