This week I am in Shenyang in China teaching at the “Sino-Dutch Biomedical and Information Engineering School, Northeastern University” (try writing that on your business card).

I have to say I was looking up to this week of teaching, not knowing what the level of the students would be, or how much they would understand of my lectures. But now, after my lectures are finished, I must say that all in all it has been a pleasant experience. My throat is still hurting from talking for four hours this morning, but the fact that the students were very interested in what I had to say and have been working hard to understand the material, really makes up for it. I hope they will do well on the exam that we have prepared for them on Friday (except for the guy that was asleep during my first talk this morning, if only I could remember his name…).

Shenyang is really something else. It is a big industrial city with countless tall and dull buildings. Like probably all Chinese cities it is dusty, smelly, dirty, and interestingly chaotic. The roads have big holes them, buildings are covered in a thick layer of gray dust that would probably give you instant cancer if you were to come into contact with it. Everything seems to have been been worn out fifty years ago, but not even one of the billion Chinese here seems to care.
A tribute to this carelessness is the urinals at the university. Something is wrong with the plumbing; as soon as you start doing your business the urinal starts to flush. Which might sound nice and clean if not for the fact that the drain can’t keep up with the water filling up the bowl at a highly competitive speed. As a result, every relief of the bladder has become a race against the clock. This apparently has been going on for months, but nobody seems to care.

If at this moment you are thinking to yourself: “why on earth didn’t you just go to the regular toilet”, you have obviously never been to China. The “regular” toilets here in China are of the type “hole-in-the-floor”. Try keeping your socks dry while you’re aiming at a yellow-brown stained pit of stink. Standing on the foot pads as you look into that hole, you familiarize with the terror that Han Solo must have felt when he was about to be dropped in one of those teeth-filled holes in the first Star Wars movie. Yikes! So back to the urinals!

There was one time when I knew I wouldn’t be fast enough, which could mean it was going to be wet-pant-teaching for the rest of the day. As this didn’t appeal to me all that much, I figured I had to pull of a daring “hold-and-switch to the next urinal” move.

The “hold-and-switch move”, has done the trick this far, but I fear the day that one of the Chinese students will be occupying the urinal next to me… I just hope I won’t overlook the poor little fellow!

Three other Dutch people are currently working at the university here and I am having a great time hanging out with them. Going out to eat is pretty cool here in China. You have a wide variety of dishes at your disposal, seahorses, chicken hearts, pig feet and chicken heads to name a few. Plus the prices are so ridiculously low you might even ignore the fact that the cook is drying your vegetables on the sidewalk in front of his restaurant, right where the neighborhood dog does its business every morning.

On Sunday I will fly back to Beijing where I will stay until the 6th of November, so the adventure continues… I’ll keep you posted!