I won't recount the entire week's activities but the majority of it has been made up of meetings and presentations at various Universities, I had a really warm welcome from colleagues at Chongqing University of Technology who really really want a combined Swansea and Chongqing University's English Language Centre on their campus here.
I had a hilarious time at the Medical University where I was to give a presentation on Swansea University's School of Health Science and specifically the Nursing related degrees on offer there. I worked on the presentation to make it less text heavy than the original I'd been sent, added some more images etc and felt pretty confident that the 250 students would receive something comprehensible and specific to their interest. Anyway I received a huge warm welcome and some big introduction from the Vice President and got up to set up the powerpoint........disaster the PC they had was corrupted with a virus which immediately wiped my USB drive clean, not only leaving me without the presentation for that evening but also a alrge amount of material I needed for the rest of my trip. My Chinese colleague an agent of Swansea University offered me his presentation to guide me as it was quite clear I was still expected to deliver, the virus was dealt with and we inserted his USB, no problem it loaded fine..................well a slight problem it was entirely in Mandarin and as I bumbled my way though it became clear that he had decided that Swansea's main selling point was not the quality of the student experience nor the quality of the research and teaching environments nor the mix of old and new architecture on campus, or images of happy students but rather image after image (covered in Mandarin text I suppose describing all I refer to above) the surrounding Gower coastline, by slide 8 and beach image 9 I had a fit of the giggles and was soon joined by the entire audience! Reaching the final slide with tumultuous applause!!
The next evening I watched a production of Under Milk Wood by students from Coleg Morganwg and some Chinese students, met up with a load of Welsh people for drinks that went on into the early hours and bumped into the ex-girlfriend of a very good friend of mine from Cardiff and a little later a guy that used to live with the very same friend!!! You couldn't make this up if you tried could you, here I am in a city of 24 million people and meet two people who know the same friend of mine!!
I left Chongqing early this morning and am now in Changsha, jet lag has been quite horrible this trip so am off for a kip before being taken out for a meal tonight.
It's good to be back in touch.
Thanks for the great post Kev. Glad it's going so well.
ReplyDelete