argh, university flashbacks!

Since graduating and starting work at Innovate Product Design earlier this year, I had forgotten what university lectures were like! But it all came flooding back today when we had two lectures on the economy of Shandong province, and ancient Chinese history and archaeology.

Economics isn’t really my “thing” – I’ve never been great with maths, but the lecture was actually pretty interesting. We were told that the main driver of Shandong’s economy is currently agriculture, and it is China’s ‘vegetable basket’, but this is quickly changing with secondary industry such as manufacturing becoming more dominant. Shandong has the second largest GDP of all of China’s provinces, and would make a great location for investment from abroad due to its rapid development.

The archaeology lecture was a bit confusing because China has so many different dynasties and cultures with different methods of social organisation and we covered a lot of material in a short time. But the main thing I took away from it is that Chinese history is completely different to European history in almost every way imaginable – people here have lived such different lives to those we are familiar with in the West and it’s easy to see why there is still such a huge gulf between our cultures. Though, being here I learn a little bit more every day to help me figure it all out!