The University of Texas at Austin Athletics
11.10.2015 | Men's Basketball
Senior center details Tuesday's team activities in Hangzhou.
Diary entry for Tuesday, November 10
(Hangzhou)
Senior center Prince Ibeh
"The biggest change for me over here is trying to get my body accustomed to the time difference (14-hour difference between Chinese time and Central time in Austin). I went to sleep kind of early last night and I couldn't sleep past 3 o'clock in the morning, so I just stayed up until we had breakfast at 7:45. Breakfast has been a little different, as I've mainly been eating fried rice and dumplings.
After breakfast, we bussed over to Alibaba and took a photo with Washington's team and Jack Ma (founder of Alibaba Group). That was so brief that I don't feel like I actually 'met' him (laughter). I just got a quick handshake. At the end of practice, I had the chance to talk with Bill Walton for a little bit (Walton is handling color analysis for the ESPN broadcast of the Texas-Washington game). He said he was excited to see us practice today and gave me some advice, from one big to another. He also gave me a little bit of his story and his background. It was a cool moment to get time with a big who was such a great player.
After our practice, we had a team meal. They had some American food there, so we were used to that. Our team went on a tour of the Alibaba campus and that was nice. I've been to Google's campus before, and this was very similar. I'm not sure if people would consider it art or architecture, but the way things were setup you could tell that they wanted to use certain displays in order to give each building its own identity around the campus. Those were nicely done.
To end the tour, we had a student seminar that showed us the numbers behind Alibaba. They went over how the company was started, what they've done throughout the years (founded in 1999) and where they are planning to go in the future. That presentation was very interesting. What I noticed was that Alibaba didn't really have any original or innovative ideas. The company took ideas from other countries and brought them here to China.
