March 14, 2008
So far we have visited seven institutions and a couple of things have stood out for me. First, I’ve noticed how people are much more focused on the details than we might be in Calgary.
For example, in one university there was a banner welcoming the distinguished visitors from the University of
Mt. Emei: Entrance to "The Number One Mountain Under the Sun," Mt. Emei, which is home of the SWJTU campus. Calgary. This is not a reusable item, but one obviously prepared for our visit. In two other places we entered to find our names and a welcome message posted on electronic bulletin boards. We have a lot of international delegations to the U of C – over 160 last year – and we often take them through Mac Hall and other parts of the campus. I wonder how difficult it would be to have an arrangement where a welcome note was posted on our electronic message boards, and left running for the day? Another possibility would be for the various university publications to have a ‘visitors’ section, where the names and destinations of delegations could be published.
Slippery signage
Secondly, I have noticed that despite the wide array of modern technology on display, people are still the first point of contact with visitors. When our car has pulled up at the gate of a university, there is a machine and the driver has to collect a parking ticket. Nothing strange about that, of course. Except that the ticket is produced for the driver, from the machine, by a person who is on gate duty. Then, as we leave, we hand the ticket to the gate keeper, and she or he swipes the card on the machine and then collects our money. One might argue that this is a total waste of money and that the machine could function on its own. Of course it could. But there would be another unemployed person with nothing to get up for in the morning, and a few hundred drivers missing out on a brief conversation with another human being. It is also helpful to be able to ask someone for directions, instead of having to rely on a faded display map of the campus.
On the way back from the Mount Emei campus of South West Jiaotong University we visited the Leshan Grand Buddha, a 71-metre-high stone carving which dates from Tang Dynasty. Located on the cliffs above the confluence of three rivers, the Buddha was carved between 713 AD and 803 AD, and is the biggest surviving stone image of Maitreya. It was an awesome sight, although navigating narrow and almost vertical 1250+ year-old stairs to get from top to bottom (and back) was a bit daunting!
Grand Buddha of Leshan