When Angela Sherman ’16 decided to tail a group of tourists as they left the Princeton University campus, she thought she would watch them ask around for a place to eat, end up tentatively trying Hoagie Haven, and then drive away, faintly disgusted, in the early afternoon.
What she actually discovered was far more shocking: the Shanghai financial district.
“Everything looked normal until we got past Tiger Noodles,” Sherman said. “Then all of a sudden it seemed like every restaurant was a Chinese restaurant!”
Sherman shrugged it off at first, figuring she was in a part of Princeton she’d “never visited before”.
“It wasn’t on my typical running route, so I didn’t really think anything of it,” explained Sherman. “But as we circled back towards Lake Carnegie, I was understanding less and less of what people were saying, and there were these three gigantic skyscrapers in front of us that I’d never seen before. Then it hit me: this is the Bund!”
After a pleasant afternoon spent exploring the Huangpu riverfront and climbing to the top of the Shanghai World Financial Center tower, Sherman began to question how she’d never been aware of the University’s location before.
“I went back to my dorm and asked my roommates, and it turns out that none of us has stepped off campus since we got here. When you’re in the Orange Bubble like that, you don’t really see a lot of the campus around you,” said Sherman.
Reaction to the news has been mixed.
“I went out into town once, and was kinda disappointed,” said Landon Chesney ’15. “I didn’t like any of the clubs as much as Cottage.”
“Man, this sucks!” said international student Zixiang Yang ’18. “I went to Princeton to get away from my parents!”
When asked for comment, University spokesperson Martin Mbugua said only that the apparent change in location was due to “business reasons”.
Similar investigations have revealed that Harvard University is now located in Tokyo, Yale University occupies downtown Seoul, and UPenn can in fact be found in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
– AKS ’15. Illustrated by AZ ’16.