Brown Bag Lunches

Once a week IES hosts brown bag lunches where you bring your food to the activity room and either watch a documentary or listen to a speaker. Today I ate some delicious pork dumplings while listening to an economics lecture. The lunch talks are optional and economics is not my absolute favorite subject on the planet, but I am determined to learn as much about China as possible while I am living in the capital city. Things I learned in today’s lecture: 1) although China is considered a developing country, the east coast is very much developed and now the biggest market for luxury goods in the world 2) the Chinese buy a lot of BMWs and Mercedes Benz 3) I dozed off a bit and forgot to take notes so that’s all I got. Oops, haha. Well the lecture was more interesting than that, but as I’m writing this my brain is fried and that is all I can remember. The first brown bag lunch was infinitely more interesting—it was a documentary about introducing concepts of democracy to Chinese primary school students by having them run campaigns to be elected for class monitor. It mostly involved a lot of crying and back stabbing, no wonder the CCP is still in charge.