Trip to Wuxi

Monday we woke up in Nanjing, had a nice breakfast (think breakfast buffet x10) and packed up our bags, checked out and loaded up the van to go to the JIE university again to meet with Dr. Hu (we had dinner with him and the VP the previous night) and his 4 colleagues in the math and sciences. Three of the ladies (all pretty young) met with us and had lunch with us. They all understand and speak some English. Jun (prof Geng) is working with Melissa and me as well as Jackie and Leo as she is a Chemistry teaching theory prof. I sat by her at the massive lunch they hosted at the very upscale faculty lounge on campus. All the table we have eaten at are massive circles with a large lazy-susan that the food is set on and spun from person to person. No passing of the dishes is necessary. The items I've eaten...well more variety than I've eaten in my life! If you go to my pictures I'll hopefully have some of them described there, it's not the Chinese food you get in the US for sure! So after lunch, we used the squat toilets (that's all they had, oh and no TP, you have bring your own!) and hopped in the van for your 2 hour highway trip to Wuxi. It is a large city (3 million!) and then we checked into the hotel and then went to the Fu Ren High School (a boarding/charter-like school) that has a great repuatation for the sciences. We had dinner tonight with the principal and other faculty after touring and having an hour meeting with them in their new/still under construction (but being used) building. We are not going there to teach tomorrow. The dinner was again very amazing, and I enjoyed sitting with Mariah and Jackie. You can't leave a dinner hungry, there is sooo much food! We all came back tired and ready to sleep (or blog first!) Off to meet our school tomorrow. At 7:30 we have breakfast!