Day 2 - "You're in China now!"

After our rather long journey here, the entire group was looking forward to not having to be on a plane at any stage during the day! After an interesting breakfast, we moved on to the Harbin Engineering University.

The University was originally the PLA Military Engineering Institute that specialised in Ship and Submarine design and manufacture, but now it is a world leading university that features amongst its courses: Ship building, Naval Architecture, Ocean Engineering and Nuclear Engineering

Enrolled at the University there are 14,949 students, which is about half of the total number of students enrolled at Southampton, but given that all the students here do engineering, it's quite a large number!

We were first treated to a talk about the university itself, and its numerous accomplishments. For example, they were the first in china to make a hovercraft, a hydrofoiling craft, and a deep sea rescue submersible amongst others. They are also an associate member of RINA, which many of the Shippies are!

We then had a tour of the facilities of the university, including their towing tank, their vibration research lab, their combined power plant lab and their historical ships museum, all of which were very interesting to see.

We then had an enjoyable lunch, where a minor diplomatic incident was avoided, and everyone struggled with chopsticks, after which we had the opportunity to meet with current HEU students and talk with them about whatever we wanted to. Topics ranged from the intellectual ("Tell me more about your hydrofoiling craft?") to the not so intellectual ("Do you like food?" - Will Philbedge 2K17). One thing that particularly shocked me was that unlike in the UK where we can expect to be able to get a job after graduating with an engineering degree in our sector, in China you have to do a lot of further study, sometime being an additional 5 years AFTER your degree, in order to even be considered for a low level engineering job. Another criteria for job seeking is that you have to speak English to a high standard; this in particular caused some embarrassment, as while our hosts could speak very good english, none of us could speak more than 3 words of Chinese. 

After exchanging WeChat contact numbers, and a large number of selfies, we then departed back to the hotel for an early dinner.

A short excursion was then planned, where we would go and visit the nearby town centre, and walk down the main shopping road. This proved highly enjoyable, as not only were there numerous souvenirs available to buy, but the public seemed to be very taken with the noticeably English tour group walking down the road, and proceeded to ask for many pictures with us (a personal highlight was when I was asked for a photograph, we assumed it was for a group shot so three of us posed, but it turned out they only wanted a photo of me, not the two girls who'd posed with me!).

After this enjoyable experience, we all returned to the hotel, which we eventually arrived at despite the best intentions of the gate keeper who had a large argument with our driver.

We're looking forward to tomorrow!