This week I started the delivery of an Entrepreneurship and Innovation course at Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU). It is a course I have delivered a couple of times previously, however the other times I have delivered the course I was living in Beijing. This made the experience significantly different, getting used to living on campus (in Haidian) and surviving without home comforts. All of the activities and restaurants I know are on the other side of the city, which is a reasonable distance to travel in Beijing. This made finding new locations an essential first task. New supermarkets, restaurants and good coffee locations.
The week following the start of the course, I went to visit North Minzu University (NMU) University in Yinchuan, Ningxia. Six months previously, I developed the partnership which saw NMU send 11 funded students to Worcester. It was the first time I had visited Ningxia and Yinchuan since 2011, so it was interesting to see how the city had developed. I remember the city having a new airport and a large highway connecting it to the city, which was considerably under capacity. The new part of the city is very peaceful and calm, with well-designed open space. The air was also clear and crisp, which allowed for seeing the Helan Mountains, which form the border between Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. Plus there was not a cloud in the sky and it felt like the blue sky was so big and went on until the end of the horizon. Whilst at NMU I delivered a short session on the difference between entrepreneurship and management, constructed from the first week of teaching at BFSU. The session required some organizing and coaxing to get 120 students up, into groups and moving around the lecture theatre and hallway. Although, the outcome of running an activity designed for circa 40 students with 120 students seemed to work ok in the end.
Robin Bell 