Photo Essay: CET Shanghai

Photos by Ben Straus (Johns Hopkins University) Student Correspondent, CET Shanghai Summer 2019

My summer experience includes my internship at xixilab, a dental device startup. Our work and international team allows me both to gain workplace experience but also get to know about many different cultures. We had a company dinner (where this picture was taken) which doubled as a Fourth of July celebration. At this dinner, we were able to talk about many different international experiences, truly showing the power of working in an environment of people from many different countries.

This worked out well. On Friday, many CET students organized a boat tour of the Huangpu River (thanks Jeff for managing) and on Saturday we went to the French Concession. What worked out well was we got a preview of our Saturday adventure from the Huangpu. This is a photo in the direction of the French Concession from our boat tour. The coolest thing about this view (which isn’t too evident from the picture) is the coordinated lighting of the area. The buildings, which span over a mile, switch between matching in colorful lighting or a beautiful shimmering gold. This made for a great view.

As I mentioned, the Saturday after the boat tour was one of our outings with Nova, our CET superstar, in the French Concession. This photo has a very particular significance though. It is of the former land of the Shanghai Mafia. Throughout this tour, we learned quite a bit about the mafias (yes, there were two) and how they made impacted Chinese life. In particular, we focused on the second Mafia, Huang Jing Rong. He was actually a seemingly good guy. Among his actions, he supported orphanages by buying their stained glass to decorate buildings he owned (and eventually donated). And, on his deathbed, he distributed all cash he had to his family but burned all debt papers to end the Mafia business and clear his family from any lingering connections. This was just one among many of stories from our outing of the French Concession.

This photo is also from our French Concession tour in front of an embroidery museum. This museum actually has rooms where embroidery is being made, making it an especially cool stop. I thought that one cool thing I never considered about embroidery is that it is often two sided. This makes it a very cool material for centerpieces as unlike a picture, it has no “blank” side.

What do you do after your internship and exhausted? Well, take a nice nap in an air-conditioned room! It was convenient that they also were showing a movie in this room. (Yes, that was a long attempt at a joke. Ignore it and replace it with: “we went to see a movie”). We saw 扫毒2天地对决, the second movie in a series about drug trafficking. The four last characters, “Tian di dui jue”, roughly mean competition between justice and injustice. The movie was more violent than I’m particularly used to. I found this somewhat surprising as even Chinese video games are specifically designed to look a little less graphic and violent (for example blood being green in the Chinese version of PUBG) due to needing approval from the Chinese government. But this moving was exceedingly violent. There were also some funny subtitle translations. Imagine these very professional government officials in full suits saying: “we need to stop focus on catching the big potatoes” (referring to the main drug distributers rather than just the users). It was definitely a worthwhile experience to see a Chinese movie and consider what might be different between this movie and a typical western movie.

Spontaneous colored dumplings outing! I ran into some friends on their way to go to a famous colored dumpling restaurant. They didn’t choose the more outlandish colors, but it was still a cool place to see. I ordered some thinly sliced potato 土豆丝 (tu dou si) as I wasn’t too hungry and just wanted a snack. Dumplings are an obvious Chinese specialty food, but I hadn’t known you can get them in colors and at some places even in cool shapes (for example some that look like cute animals).

Miniature World! What’s that? Take a look. It’s what you’d think. But, it’s better because this mini-world you see here is a historical replica of the buildings in the Bund (a popular tourist area in Shanghai that’s very close to the area in the second picture in this post). And it’s interactive! You can press buttons to make boats move along the Huangpu, a building infamous for having burnt down begin “burning” with firefighters at the ready, and make cool lights flash. In addition to this mini-replica, there were other replicas (but not filled with Shanghai history) and a cool room (in the next picture).

Miniature world also has this historical video room (with cool mirrored walls). The hanging cubes each show famous Chinese movies. In addition to just being an illusion of infinite space, this was also a cool “immersion into history”.

I got my visa changed so that I could legally intern in China and I realized that the Shanghai Science and Technology museum was nearby. So, I thought maybe I could quickly take a look and make this a very productive outing. What I didn’t know was how massive this museum is. Just take a look. And it’s not just pure physical size because on an average day they have around 13,000 people inside at one time! Since I didn’t quite have enough time on this outing to explore the museum, this photo is a precursor to a photo that will be from the inside in a future post!

The Shanghai museum has some very cool exhibits (a tea room, calligraphy exhibit, ceramics, and more). Unfortunately, they are normally closed at night (a convenient time to visit when you have an internship during the day). However, they have been testing out nighttime hours this summer on some Fridays. So, we got to go! There were far too many things to see to choose just one photo, so I gave up on the decision and just went with a photo of us in front of this staircase in the museum’s entryway. Nonetheless, it’s still pretty beautiful with the plants and colors that surround us.

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Cover photo caption: This picture is a great example of the experience filled classes CET offers. This was an international marketing class lunch at a restaurant called Hungry Lung’s Kitchen. The reason we went there was that our professor knows the Canadian owner who recently started up this restaurant in China. We have been learning about how companies adjust to different cultures as they become international and this was a very cool real-life example that we could learn about from the owner directly rather than from reading an article. As well, there are now four locations of this restaurant, making for a good discussion on expansion. Lastly, I have to mention the plating was impeccable. Each dish (whether mac and cheese, an omelet, steak and eggs, or lasagna) came out on a different type of dish (cast iron pan, wooden board, fancy plate, etc). It was very impressive. This picture was taken during our conversation with the owner (a sliver of my face can be seen in the very right corner).

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