I am thankful for being given the opportunity to participate in DATE* 2019 by the school and in this 14 weeks, I hope I’ll be able to share more about my experience. The first week at Zhejiang University, has been enriching and enlightening for me. The culture, people, scenery, lifestyle is a lot different than what I have expected.
Since this was a particularly free week, I have toured a few places in Hangzhou and I was pretty impressed with the level of technology that the daily citizen interacts with here. Payment everywhere, be it the cinemas, restaurants, tour tickets and claw machines(hehe), everything here is seamlessly easy and convenient. Everything they order is via the internet. In addition, when I went to watch Detective Pikachu at a nearby cinema, all the movies there are screened in iMax 3D, so you couldn’t watch in 2D. All in all, China is pretty far ahead in terms of applying technology into the daily lives of people and I think I am pretty impressed with that.
However, with all positive things comes with some bad things too. I am not sure about the safety standards of driving here but if you hop into a taxi or DiDi** cab here, you are in for a roller coaster of a ride. I really hope nothing bad happens while I am here and I hope I will get use to this. This really makes me cherish the type of drivers I experience on the road in Singapore.
My favorite sight of the week was the light show at XiHu( 西湖 ). It was amazing and probably on par or better than the one at Jewel. I have watched several light shows around the world and this one, to me, was the most exciting one. Maybe in the future, I’ll have the privilege of designing and engineering one as good as that.
This has been one exciting first week and I really hope I will be able to interact more with the local people here and immerse myself into the environment. I am looking forward to the life here.
*DATE is a 14 weeks exchange to Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
**DiDi is a ride sharing company in China, similar to the Grab.
