This Campus is Large

When you have 2 weeks with nothing to do before starting work days tend to seep away with nothing productive coming of them. To combat that, Megan and I have tried to have at least one goal for each day we have free before school starts. Yesterday our goal was to explore the campus of the school we're teaching at. We succeeded.

Shandong University of Science and Technology has 35,000 students, but unlike most American schools that I have visited that are about that size, this school doesn't blend into a city. There isn't a "college town" feel. The entire campus is contained within walls with gates, and there isn't much else within those walls. Roughly half the campus is dedicated to housing and half are for academic buildings. There is a road down the middle that divides these.

The campus is nice and very pretty in spots, but I got the feeling that all the buildings were thrown up in a great rush so that they could get started on the next one. Much of China feels that way in fact. Megan said that she thought that China is so busy building things that they don't have any time to maintain things. This is true of the campus. I counted about 50 basketball hoops around the campus, not one had a net (that always bugs me). That said, everything is still fairly new so nothing is in that bad of shape. Many of the buildings are extremely large and impressive from the exterior, so hopefully they're nice on the inside too.

We took a lot of photos while wandering around, so enjoy. Click on the photos to enlarge.

A pagoda on campus.

The pagoda across part of the pond.

Megan walking by some of the dorms.

Everything is closed for the holiday.

A town near the campus and some gardens.

A hoop (w/o a net!) in the shadow of the mountains outside campus.

They had a little courtyard with a bunch of statues of famous thinkers. This is Einstein. None of the statues were of Chinese people.

Megan with Newton.

Some of the dorms across a field. I think the campus will be nice in the spring.

Megan looking at the ice in the river/pond thingy.

The main gate of the campus.

My favorite building, the first one you see when you enter campus.

The foreign languages building, where we assume we'll be teaching.

A closer view.

The view right when you enter the main gate. We're not sure what the use the big screen for.

Some gate inside the campus.