“Ring Ring,” its 7am and the wake up call never fails to come too soon.  Many of us are lacking on sleep at this point in time, but we always make sure to catch a nap on the bus.  Uni-President was our first stop of the day of the two beverage companies that we were headed to visit.  Uni-President manufactures beverages and packaged noodle bowls, comparable to ramen noodles in the US.  As we were touring different production lines, we learned that their beverages were all produced in house.  All the way from the bottle manufacturing, bottling the product, to labelin

Today we started off by going to the famous French Concession neighborhood, where there were bars, restaurants, and shops. Like usual we all stopped at Starbucks to enjoy a cup of coffee and then walked around to enjoy the view. After this we walked the Bund which is a riverwalk of the Huangpu River  where you can view both the new “Pudong” section of Shanghai as well as the older more historic neighborhoods.   Pudong is home to the financial district of Shanghai which we will visit later this day.

On Monday, May 26, we checked out of Zhejiang University International Dorm on the Yuquan Campus at 9am. After an hour and a half, we arrived at Hangzhou Wahaha Group Co., which is known as the largest beverage producer in China. Public Relations Director, Summer Cheng, gave us a tour of one of their production line facilities and explained the entire process from producing a bottle, to inserting a beverage inside, to shipping the finished product.

Sunday seemed like a day of recovery considering we arrived at our Zhejiang University dorm rooms at 2am Saturday night. Upon arrival we were just a bit surprised. Until this point we had been spoiled with fancy hotels, but the dorm rooms essentially had the bare necessities to go about life: bed, bathroom, and a roof. After a short rest we woke up at 9 a.m.

Nǐ hǎo! We arrive at the halfway point of our journey with this blog post. We have learned so much and have developed great friendships during our travels thus far, and we are excited for what the last half of the trip will bring for us.

Our last day in Beijing began with an early start at 6 am by saying goodbye to Carl- the last thing we wanted to do.  We all loaded the bus and headed for the train station in Beijing to depart for Henan province and the city of Luohe.  This train station did not compare to Union Station, Amtrak, or anything in the United States.  The high-speed bullet rail train of China is more comfortable than many of us expected and included larger seats, more legroom, and speeds of 300 km/h.   After spending a few hours of much needed rest on the train, we arrived in Luohe (pro

Today we enjoyed a later start than usual. Our eventful day began when we left our hotel at 8:30 and headed straight for the Xi Fan Di market in Beijing. According to Carl, our tour guide, it is the largest market in Asia.

Wednesday morning started off bright and early with a wake up call at 6:30 am. We quickly ate breakfast and headed onto the bus. We had a long ride to our destination, but everyone was able to sleep on the bus. Our first stop was at Fucheng Dairy, where we met the farm manager, Mr. Li. When we arrived it looked similar to a campus or a small fair with multiple exhibition buildings. We first got the chance to walk through a small dairy museum, learning about organic cattle feed and infant milk. Next we moved into a cattle barn where we saw a cow getting a massage.

We started off our day going to the China Agricultural University of Beijing where we had a presentation about food product traceability and safety from one of the MBA professors, Dr. Chen. Traceability is the process which tracks food products throughout the supply chain. The steps in the supply chain are similar to those in the United States; for example, the produce starts with a farmer, then upstream suppliers, suppliers, warehouse, consignees, distribution, and lastly the point of sale. We learned that the traceability process has four components.

We have just finished our first day of exploration in China, and what a day it has been! Our journey began with a nonstop 14 hour flight from Chicago to Beijing. We left from Chicago at 7:45pm on Saturday and arrived in Beijing at 11:00pm on Sunday.  We were pretty exhausted after the initial travel, so we promptly went to sleep before the next day.