Author: Will

Got up at 8 am, since class wasn’t until 10. Dealt with email for a bit. Chatted with one of the guys I met at the taiji class, and arranged to meet with him and walk over to the taiji club practice tomorrow evening.

Then walked over to the bank and withdrew some money before class. (The first atm didn’t actually have any cash in it, but the second one I tried worked fine.)

Class was with prof. zhang, and it turns out that our plan for fridays will be to learn colloquial chinese expressions. today we went through common forms of greetings, thanks, ‘see you later’s, wish you well’s, sorry’s, and anger. It was interesting, lots of modifications of the forms, similar to the various slang we have around all of those expressions.

After class I started heading over to the capital museum. It ended up with max, rebecka, sergio, and jeremy wanting to come. However, rebecca max and sergio were still dealing with finishing their homework, so jeremy and I took the subway and told them to call us when they got there.

The museum was huge. I spent about 3 hours going through it (admission was free, I registered online about a week ago to reserve tickets.) The coolest stuff were the galleries of ancient paintings and calligraphy. The other group got there about an hour after us.

Lots of stuff from the museum, I’ll post some of the photos I took soon, but it was a very cool place.

Came back, and a large group of most of our program ended up coming with me to an indian place I found online. $80 kuai for an indian buffet, in the northeast part of the city. The food was really good, and I stuffed myself on it. The restaurant was on lucky street, as it said online, but that turned out to be a street, tucked behind a fairly non-descript park that was just a row of cool looking international restaurants. I’d definitely consider going back to the area.

Got back at about 10. Most people still don’t seem to have gotten their internet working for whatever excuse, so I let a couple use my computer for a while. Tried unsuccessfully to run a program called pps, which is theoretically one of the best ways to get movies here. (our teacher recommended it.) Sadly it’s windows only. When trying to emulate it it turns out that it’s based on maze, the program developed by the university.

Talked for a while with some of the others. Rebecka and I went through some of our shared acquaintances (she knew laurel from scds, who I vaguely remember.) Also she taught for a couple years as a snowboard instructor at fiorini.

I’ll try to post another post specifically on the capital museum with some additional photos, along with the art district we’re going to tomorrow.

Woke up at 7 am, pretty tired this morning. Class went fine, although neither of us remembered that beyond the homework we were supposed to debate (the teacher forgot as well, so we did an off the cuff discussion of if celebrities should be able to have personal secrets.)

After class, I recharged my meal card for on campus with another couple hundred kuai, which should last for quite a while.

I didn’t do a whole lot over the lunch period break, talked to some people, wrote some emails, and started a bit of homework.

At two was our core class. The same lecturer as last week was there. The topic for today was the rural versus urban population. He was pretty pessimistic, saying that china now was going much to far towards the US, and it was really going to hurt the country in 10 years. Apparently there will be a new law up for discussion soon that extends land contracts from 30 to 70 years, which will result in much of the rural area becoming effectively privatized. There is also talk that rural residents can fully sell off their land rights to companies.

The problem is that for the 150 to 200 million migrant workers, right now there isn’t rebellion because even if there are economic downturns, they have a guaranteed safety net in that they can go back to their villages and get a house and a plot of land and can be self sufficient. If that goes away, there could be a major rebellion from a market downturn.

Someone asked about tibet, his response to that was also different from what we hear in the US. Tibet has been interwoven with china for about 1200 years, originally most of sichuan was part of their empire, but once Buddhism spread to the area the tibet culture retreated into the mountains. More recently, tibet has gotten a ton of development money from china, but the tibet people are not good at capitalizing on that, and so han chinese have migrated into the area and made most of the profits. During the cultural revolution the communists signed a pact with the tibet leadership saying that they could have another 20 years of their dual government / spiritual system without reforms. Now the dahli lama is on the payroll of the US, getting close to $200,000 usd/year, and has no reason to re-unite with china. Any time he suggests it, the US gives him hope that they will back him to form a strong new country that can take over sichuan again, and he cancels talks. China isn’t about to give up the region though, because in the modern era it would be economically stupid to give up land.

After the class, we had our first session of calligraphy. we got through how the traditional calligraphy is drawn, although we haven’t exactly learned the brush techniques, but at least we can reconstitute the ink, and can hold the brush (approximately) correctly. Calligraphy, it turns out, is done with the right hand, so that’s been an experience so far. Since it’s entirely from the elbow with small flicks of the wrist, my stuff today doesn’t look any worse than anyone else, and who knows – maybe it’ll help me become ambidextrous.

After that class it was about 6. Most people took off to get dinner immediately, I was asked to return the projector to the office. I found jeremey still the the dorm, so we went over to a hot pot place for dinner. (still on campus, of course). I hadn’t been there, but now that the weather’s colder I’ll go there a lot I think. You grab a basket when you go in the door, and add skewers of food into it. At the end of the skewer area you give the basket to an attendant who counts the number of skewers and rings you up, then your number is called and you get a bowl of soup with the stuff you picked out. For 10 kuai I got noodles, mushrooms, bok choy, meat dumpling things, weird rectangles that turned out to be fake crab meat, quail eggs, and other vegetables of various sorts. There were several noodle choices, and it looked like you could also ask for a big piece of chicken to be added at the end.

Came back to the dorms, and did a bit more homework this evening, although it isn’t due until monday. fridays are review days, and apparently we will be doing some review and also learning about colloquialisms and how Chinese is spoken in day-to-day conversation. It should be fun.

Looking forward to going to the museum tomorrow, and maybe we’ll end up going to an Indian restaurant I found tomorrow evening.

Oh, One last thing I accomplished this evening that I’m really happy about, is that I took another crack at making my iphone work, and it now has internet access. It turns out that the only problem was that I wasn’t properly telling it to proxy stuff through china mobile’s WAP gateway. To do that you have to edit a weird preference file deep in the iphone’s system – not something to take on lightly – but now I have internet anywhere in the city which is quite cool. It’s only really practical if you’re here for a while though because it takes about a month for the company to get around to enabling your account to use it (Mine was supposed to start getting it october 1st, and It’s taken me a week to get around to making it actually work)

Had class this morning. It was fine, I managed to remember everything I needed to. After class I spent the afternoon studying for the next lesson, and finishing up the core homework for tomorrow. Then I went out and bought a tea pot ($40 kuai) an eraser (my pencil doesn’t have one) and tape.

Came back, finished up the homework for thursday, and met with my math tutor. We talked for about an hour and a half, going over neighborhoods, and algebraic roots. Both interesting things, and it cleared up two points that I hadn’t really gotten before.
(代数 = algebra, 分析 = analysis, 极限点 = limit points (极 = most or extreme, 限 = finite or limited, 点 = point))

Continued studying characters this evening, and also surfed the web for a bit regarding the presidential elections.

Not much else of interest

Studied for most of the morning. Basically got through all of the 10th lesson, and got the math homework done.

Had a good lunch and then went to class at 2pm.

It was disp class, so we got to find out changes they wanted to our proposal and who our research tutors are. I got 98% and 100% on my two proposals, and got assigned a tutor for the intellectual property one, although she wasn’t there. She’s apparently a law school student, which makes her as qualified as anyone to help me.

The rest of that class wasn’t the most exciting, they had us talk about our trip to anhui, and the cultural differences we observed while there. Overall no particularly exciting revelations.

Afterward I refilled my thermos (having a thermos of tea is really nice) and went to chinese class. Did fine on the dictation, and the class was about the same as always. At the end we went to dinner with our teacher, and held the last 15 minutes of class in the dining hall while we were eating. It was nice, a bit less formal than in the class room, since we were just discussing the text that went with the chapter.

She also teaches for other programs, and had spent the morning teaching a group of 8 americans who were learning chinese for the first time.

Came back this evening, and have been studying the 11th lesson all evening. It’s the longest one we’ve hit yet, so it’s sort of a shame it got pushed into one of the slots where we have less time to study.

At 8:30 Joe and I walked over to where we thought the taiji practices were held, but couldn’t find them. I’ve been in email contact with one of the taiji students I met when we were doing our classes, and I sent him an email asking were they are taking place.

not much else going on; Although there’s lots of excitement coming up on the horizon now that I’ve got a couple tickets to plays and will be going to a museum on friday.

Tomorrow evening I’ll meet with my math tutor, thursday we’ve got our first calligraphy class.

Woke up again for class this morning. The test went fine.
Afterward, I wrote out the 10th lessons characters, finished up the math homework from last week, which i’ve been procrastinating, and got about half way done on the math for this upcoming week.

I also got a bit further in the core class homework due thursday. Did my laundry. (The laundry machines aren’t quite as exciting as the ones in shanghai, the card has contacts that you have to place on the machine rather than full RFID.)

Had a nice meal of chao mien (noodles with cabbage and beef and stuff) at a dining hall I haven’t been too before. Discovered two more restaurants that I haven’t been to in the process.

Not much else going on, Classes tomorrow are in the afternoon, but I’m hoping to finish up math in the morning, and also get started previewing for the 11th lesson, because after tomorrows class there won’t be a whole lot of time.

Spent most of the day inside studying. It was colder today.

I feel reasonably confident that I know all the words I’ll need tomorrow, but it did take pretty much all day to get them all.

I spent a couple hours with my Chinese tutor going over stuff, and then went to dinner with her and Yu miao. That was quite nice, they both got black bean porridge, which is apparently what you get once it starts getting cold.

I also went out this evening and got theater tickets to a couple student center events, to give me stuff to do. I have tickets for next sunday and tuesday. Sunday is for a concert of some sort, I am not entirely sure what music will be played though. Tuesday is for a play of Shakespeare’s king lear. It will be performed in english with chinese subtitles from the poster. It should be enjoyable.

I spent some time talking with friends but spent most of the time doing various forms of homework. class starts up again tomorrow.

Another fairly normal day, I’ll continue posting the interesting events I encounter, but I’ll be cutting down a bit on post length since it’s hard to dedicate half an hour every day to this activity.

I spent a lot of time studying chinese, and some time doing programming. I got out again in the afternoon, and helped max buy an external hard drive. Got him an external 500gb drive in a usb2 enclosure for 630 rmb, so a bit under 100 us, which is about what you’d expect for it in the US as well.

I also got a thermos and some pens while walking around.

Dinner was quite good, Hot peppers with scrambled eggs over rice, and a steamed rice with red bean thing for desert.

The temperature these past few days has been really nice.

I set up a little javascript thing of photos I took a couple days ago, it’s for a project that we’re supposed to do as homework for thursday. It’s done if they were using firefox, but they’ll probably be using IE, so I need to get it to vaguely work in that browser as well.

I should be able to be well prepared for the chinese test come monday, and that’s the main thing I’m working on. Math is also coming along fine, and I’ll find out about disp stuff at our class for it this tuesday.

I woke up at 8 this morning. Again, spent most of the morning on the computer. I studied a fair bit of Chinese, spent some time looking through travel sites, and some time on math homework.

As to travel sites, I looked up flights and hotels for both a possible trip to inner Mongolia, and for after the program. I found a nice hotel in shanghai for about $75 us / night, and train tickets to shanghai for as little as 20 us, although that’s for a seat on a 12 hour train, and so paying closer to 75 US for a bed probably makes more sense. Trains are way cheaper than planes, but you can only book a week in advance. We’ll have to see if it’s doable.

In the afternoon I decided to take a walk. It was a much nicer day today than yesterday, with very little smog at all. I walked south until I hit the subway line, and then walked northeast for a ways. I ended up in an upper class area a bit south of the computer area I’ve been to before. One of the really cool things I saw was an above ground parking garage. Each stall actually fit what looked to be 4 cars, a car would pull into the stall, and then it would rise up, so that another car could fit underneath. Some stalls still had several cars stacked vertically this way, which was really cool.

I saw a lot of outdoor equipment in the shopping mall, rain jackets and hiking boots were everywhere. I looked around vaguely for skiing or snowboarding gear and didn’t see anything even vaguely related. After getting lost, I found that the place I was in connected to the carrifour I’ve been to previously. I walked out that way, and in the entrance to the supermarket there was a fashion show going on. For whatever reason they’d set up a runway, and had models exhibiting new fashions. I suppose an upper class mall is as good a place as any to do that. Additionally, around the same area there was a photo gallery set up. If I were to choose the title it would be called “Dogs of the SiChuan earthquake”. Each picture had some sort of dog involved with the earthquake; there were dogs with rescue volunteers, rescue dogs in the wreckage, Dogs with firefighters in helicopters. It made for a very strange contrast with the runway models it surrounded, to say the least.

I came back at about 5, and wasted time in my room until people were ready to go out to dinner. Max had found a Mexican restaurant in the expat area of Beijing, and I was up for visiting the area once. The place turned out to be less than a block from the Beijing apple store, so I now know where that is, although we wandered for about 30 minutes trying to find it. It turned out that we had to enter an Italian restaurant, go through it’s back door, and then found our Mexican place along with a cluster of other otherwise inaccessible restaurants. I got a burrito. It wasn’t bad at all, but was an American price. It did have cheese, which is a food item that is not present in Chinese cooking at all, and I haven’t had for the last few weeks.

After dinner we walked around the area a bit. There were a bunch of bars and clubs, mostly with English signs, and appealing to a rich, upscale, European or American clientele. We stopped briefly in a bar that had been recommended, the menus were only in English, the prices were the same as one might expect in America. We caught a subway back to school. It cost 25 cents, instead of the 8 us that it cost to taxi over. Now I know where it is in case my computer ever breaks.

Not much since then, we got off the subway a stop early, because the marking is silly, and the stop marked haidan road is actually on the zhongguancun side of campus and not the haidan side. The walk back to campus was nice, the temperature has cooled down to a balmy but not sweltering level.

I woke up at 7, out of habit more than anything else, which was surprising since I’d been up until 2am.

I continued to deal with the computer stuff I started last night, and geolocated all the photos I posted yesterday. I also moved this website over to my online hosting, so it will hopefully be a bit more reliable, and won’t depend on my home connection.

I showered, had lunch (green beans, tofu, cucumber, rice. It was just fine.) and did some homework.

I wrote up the core class essay due next thursday, then walked outside and took some photos of the campus for the other part of the core homework.

Outside today is much more hazy than when we left. the ending of the olympics has had time to sink in now, and there’s a fairly thick haze in the air.

I hung out for most of the afternoon, got my room organized again, and drank tea. I caught up on world news, read a few articles about the stuff going on in America, smiled wryly.

For dinner a group of us went to a different shitang (dining hall). I got a couple baozi (buns with stuff in) and a cucumber + pepper + meat dish that was surprisingly good.

After dinner I walked over to the student center to see what movies they were offering in the near future. Of interest is that next sunday there appears to be an orchestration of anime themes, which could be interesting. The week after that they are doing a couple different Shakespeare performance, king lear and then taming of the shrew. I can’t tell what type of performance, because they have both actors (and are priced at the live level) but also say ‘in english with chinese subtitles’. I think I’ll get tickets to at least one of them and see how it is.

This evening I hung out with the other program kids. Only two people ended up going to nanjing, and the other 9 are back now. I played Dr. Horrible for them and they all quite enjoyed it.

I’ll probably go to bed pretty soon. Tomorrow will study some chinese, do some math, and talk to some travel agents.

I woke up at about 8, catching up on some sleep after the mountain adventure yesterday. I showered and packed up, and fiddled around on the computer for a little bit before heading down to breakfast at 8:30. We checked out of the hotel at 9 am, and took the bus over to jinxi (i think that’s the name of it.)

It’s one of the oldest towns in the area, although there’s really only one street that has the original architecture.

It took about an hour to get over there. Most of the time was spent with the folks who had planned to stay longer trying to figure out what they were going to do. Since it’s national holiday week, everything’s booked pretty solid, and they weren’t having much luck finding hotels or transportation.

I walked through the old street for a couple hours once we got to the town. It was about as expected, pretty much entirely a tourist trap. I got an old painting, really just a silk screen. It apparently is quite famous, but the quality leaves a lot to be desired. I bargained for 30 kuai, and probably could have gotten it for less.

Afterward I met up with some of the other groups and we wandered around a bit more. We stopped in a coffee shop off the main road. It turned out to be owned by a guy from beijing who spoke good english. Rebecca got a latte and mary got an order of fries. Most of the others were off at a bus station at this point trying to buy bus tickets. We read through their guest book at the coffee shop, noticed a lot of people from canada and western europe, and signed it ourselves.

Near the end I got some bubble tea from a stand that was quite passable. Max got a bag of pieces of fried chicken on toothpicks. He complained that they had been fried much more than needed.

at 1 we got back on the bus, it turned out that everyone had decided to go to hefei, because the only buses from jinxi were for the next day and there weren’t any hotels or hostels in the city that they could find.

The drive back to hefei was about 4 hours, and we got in at 6 ish. We stopped for a while at a rest station to stop our legs, and also apparently to delay our arrival since there was some sort of discount the tour guide would have to give us if we got to the airport too early.

I napped on and off and looked at the scenery passing by.

The airport was small as we’d seen upon exit. We couldn’t check in until an hour and a half before the flight, so we waited for the first hour outside the checkin area. I read my book. We checked in, which was as smooth as ever. In the waiting area were overpriced food and gimmicks which weren’t particularly interesting, and pretty universal to every airport. I spaced out until our flight was called.

The plane was fine. I read some and did a bit of programming for the hour and a half. I tried to figure out how to change the xbtt program, and got a bit closer to what I want to do with it.

We got to beijing safely, and took taxis back to campus. There was basically no traffic since it was 11 pm.

I got in, and checked my email, and am now downloading and getting ready to post pictures. It won’t be too long before I go to bed.