Wednesday, March 7

The alarm clocks rang early this morning at 6:30 am as we prepared ourselves for a busy day. Once on the bus, or "coach" as our tour guide Michelle calls it, we headed toward the Olympic Village. For the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing, China built two brand new facilities, The Bird's Nest and The Water Cube. The Bird's Nest was host for many different events, however, a more familiar building, The Water Cube, was host to water sports. Michael Phelps won some gold medals in this building. Let's just say there are many Phelps Phans on our trip, including our tour guide Michelle who was host to him that year. Next stop was a wholesale market. As we entered the building some eye-catchers were chicken feet, sheep heads, and a lot of commotion. The purpose of the market is for business and restaurant owners to attend and purchase products for the menus. It was interesting to see the difference in meat quality here when compared to what we have seen in our classes and what we eat back in South Dakota. Take for instance marbling (intramuscular fat), when we saw a cross-section of a loin eye there was much less marbling then I would want in my steaks, but, there are many choices for the Asian chef, nonetheless. As the time ticked by, we found ourselves in the Emporer Hospital for Femur Head Necrosis. This hospital has been around for 16 years and the head professor, Dr. Huang, has been researching this problem for around 30 years. The disease affects the head of the femur bone affecting the hip joint. The problem affects range of movement and flexibility. The hospital focuses on traditional Chinese medicine, especially herbal treatments and acupuncture, to help patients recover from the disease. No western medicine is involved meaning it is non-operative and non-invasive, however, people from countries all over the world travel here for this treatment. There are two hospitals like this in the world, the one in Beijing and another in Moscow, Russia. There is no other facility like these two in the world. We saw x-rays of effective treatment. As for further expansion, it is difficult as a lot of money is involved and to get a hospital in the USA is equally as difficult as an approval from the FDA is expensive and takes many years to receive. It was a unique experience as we felt very welcome and we realized just how welcoming a hospital like this can be if you need the help. To replenish our busy bodies, we ate a lunch buffet which included American pizza and other choices. And finally, we arrived at the biggest part of our day. We met with our pen-pals at the China Agriculture University and the Mafic students and Dr. Li the Founder and Head of Mafic. Mafic stands for Ministry of Agriculture Feed Industry Centre. Our partners were Will and Zijuan. Will is a PhD student with an emphasis swine nutrition. His project focuses on the umbilical cord blood of swine fetuses. He hopes to be able to develop a way to feed the sows a proper diet so the piglets can grow at a faster rate to increase food production around the world. He will finish his project this summer before he'll spend a year at Texas A&M University to further his research. Zijuan focuses her Masters project on lactating and gestating sows. Through her studies, she hopes to make swine nutrition during reproduction a more efficient and well-managed production cycle for the swine producer. The students met with their own partners and were given a tour of the campus of the China Agriculture University. At the University many research projects occur such as livestock metabolism and research with rats occur. Greenhouses were filled with corn research projects and I can't wait to see what China has for the agriculture industry in the future. To finish the night off, we had a banquet with our students at a restaurant near the campus. The Mafic students sat with their partners including Will and Zijuan. Some things that we found on our plates were fried chicken, head and all, flounder, whole fried fish, and delicious pastries. The Chinese food here is amazing. Move over King's Wok. It was really great to see that the lifestyles of college students in America are so similar to those in China. We made great friends with students half way around the world. A toast to Dr. Thaler. Because of the friendship he made with Dr. Li at K State University in 1989 we were able to make a friendship of a lifetime with a student who has the same interests as we have: agriculture. This wouldn't have been possible without the two of them. Tomorrow we will be visiting a hog farm, the Great Wall of China and an acrobat show. To give a sense of the day are three words: humbled, thankful, and fun.