Category: Post

got through reasonably unscathed.

The last lesson didn’t go terribly well, but we were never tested on it, and the final went quite well. I might review it on my own time.

Yesterday was the final in the morning, and then we had a thanksgiving dinner in the evening. That was a lot of fun. I talked with prof. wang about travel plans for after the semester, and she gave me several places near guiyang that might be more fun to go to, and also is giving me the contact for the travel agent that the school uses.

She said that we should think about hiring a driver for the week – that it wasn’t that expensive and gave a nice level of both flexibility and having someone familiar with the area.

Packed up today. I fully filled both the backpack I brought, and a large suitcase I bought while here. The speakers are pretty heavy, though they fit in the suitcase without problems.

Meeting my host family this evening, and staying with them for the next two weeks. it’s a decent bus ride north of campus, and not particularly convenient in terms of subway or other access. Luckily I’ve got a bike, so I can bike down to the subway.

looking forward to tomorrow, and looking forward to having moved in and having life settle down a little bit.

Busy week, stuff’s already beginning to wrap up.

On wednesday I had class, then went to the hilton and got tickets for the wine even this coming weekend. I continued down the subway to the tailor afterwards and picked up my suit, which looks really nice.

Came back that afternoon, did a couple hours of math tutoring and went out to diner. Jeremy’s parents invited the group out to a nice pan-asian place (it was a classy restaurant – also jeremy’s birthday). It was an amazing meal, lobster, fish, the duck of course, really good.

Came back at like 11pm, and managed to study the 6 pages of characters for thursday before bed.

thursday was class, which was fine, then in the afternoon was core class on chinese literature and the themes in classical chinese writing. The evening was our last calligraphy class, where we wrote a full page of calligraphy that we’ll get back at some point. Mine doesn’t look too bad.

On friday there were two classes, first the ‘colloquial chinese’ one. We did presentations on media that were a bit longer than in the past. I presented to forms of media, first a newspaper article on chinese hackers attacking foreign computer systems. Then a kids TV episode of cat policemen.

In the afternoon we had our weekly test, which was fine.

In the evening friday I went to houhai. There are a combination of dance clubs, music clubs, and nice restaurants around the lake, we walked around for a while, and then chose a restaurant about a block away instead that had chinese in it.

The food was quite good, especially their eggplant dish and a beef curry.

on saturday and sunday I focused mostly on emails and catching up. Dealt with travel plans for after the program for a while and for my plans next summer.

Started preparing for the chinese final as well – and did bits of programming on various topics.

Monday and today were good.

Chinese monday morning, learned the characters without trouble. Monday afternoon did a fitting for the suit which looks really nice. Wandered around the city a bit on the way back, and then got my presentation for today finished monday evening.

This morning I got over to the bank to take out some money, studied the characters for wednesday, and got some math done.

This afternoon were the presentations. Mine was one of the better ones, probably the most professional. That public speaking class has me well prepared for these sorts of things. Definitely worthwhile taking that class.

Got some dinner after that ended, and then have been starting to study the characters for thursday this evening. Our teacher told us to get started on them early because there are 6 pages of them :(

Also have been getting involved with the website I started coding this summer again. They’re working on getting some new people and keeping the current iteration of the site working, and I’m trying to keep people’s conflicts at the background since they all seem to like me.

This weekend turned out to be both productive and fun. I got a lot of what needed to be done, although I didn’t make progress on travel plans for next month, so that’s now a priority.

On Friday there was class in the morning. I talked about a kids TV show I watched, and then read a newspaper article about France’s immigrant population, and the french reaction to Obama’s presidency.

In the afternoon Friday I went over to a market and bought a suit, or that is to say started the process. I’m going back tomorrow (monday) for the first fitting. The total price is $1000, which is in line with what I was seeing online and such. The place is in the expat area, so prices are a bit inflated, but after asking my tutors they said that it was hard to get western style clothing fitted elsewhere, and I was seeing other Chinese in the market so it’s not just a tourist trap. Spent a bit of time afterward in the official apple store which was between the market and the subway. Played with the new macbook’s – they’re really nice. Thought about getting a new pair of headphones for my iPhone, and then remembered that they don’t sell those in china because they don’t sell iphones in china.

Came back, and then went out almost immediately for dinner. Went with Jeremy to Ghost street (actually, the place formerly known as ghost street, now the ‘gui’ part of the street’s name means 3 legged pot instead of ghost). We walked a ways down the street, it was clearly the place to be, lots of restaurants, some with long lines out front. Lots of seafood looking places, but really a large variety with some hot pot, some that had fried duck, and more.

We ended up going into a muslim place fairly far down the street. It was pretty small and about 50% full. We got four dishes: a ‘mutton specialty’, a ‘mutton with pancakes’, a broccoli with garlic, and the potato hashbrown dish we’d had previously at the fried duck restaurant.

The food was really good. The mutton with pancake were small pieces of meat, onions and peppers with small rice wrappers, sort of like moo-shu but with a very spiced flavor. Not hot per say, just lots of spices.

The mutton specialty was simply amazing, 8 rectangular pieces of meat, which was largely fat that was breaded on both sides. one side with peanuts and the other with sesame seeds. The whole thing melted in your mouth and just tasted fantastic.

I spent saturday morning doing work. I began studying the chinese characters for monday, and got started trying to deal with internship stuff next summer. I also sent out another round of emails to mudd people.

In the afternoon I met with my tutor, and we decided to walk over to tsinghua university. It turns out that it’s not very far, just two blocks to the north east of beida. It’s campus is much more reminiscent of a traditional college, with larger parks and more western style buildings. It’s also a huge campus. We talked about the differences in the campuses for a while. On the way out we passed by google’s headquarters, and my tutor also pointed out a fried duck place in the same complex that’s part of the chain that apparently has the best fried duck. I had dinner with her and then went back to the dorm.

In the evening, (about 10 minutes after getting back.) I went to another talk I’d found online. This one was by the BMW head in china. An english guy that had studied at beida for a post doc. He talked about branding and how to brand your product. it was for the beijing university international MBA program. Mostly chinese students though, and most of them seemed to be their because they wanted to work at BMW. His talk was pretty generic, and he didn’t get into many of the specific challenges in terms of preserving brand in china. He was still a good speaker, although the talk wasn’t quite what I was hoping for.

Today has been mostly work as well. I’ve spent it alternating between learning chinese for tomorrow, and preparing a presentation on my research for tuesday. the powerpoint for that is mostly done, and shouldn’t be a problem.

Busy days these last two weeks of class. (this semester went by really fast. Two weeks of classes, and then two weeks of homestay left.) I need to go back and deal with the suit tomorrow. I also got a group to go to the hilton’s food & wine event in a couple weeks, just as a way to finish the classes. I made reservations but I need to stop by their offices to get tickets. I also need to make time pretty soon to get to a travel agency. I’m going to get that done this week – been delaying it too long.

Let see, it’s been a fairly quite few days overall.

Classes, concluding with a chinese weekly quiz this morning which went quite well.

Made progress on my disp, talked to a law student in IP law today for an hour. That was really interesting and has changed my perceptions on what’s going on a lot. turns out stuff is regulated at least in the country to a level I had totally not realized before. he thinks that china’s copyright laws are too strict (copyright period here is 50 years, he was saying that as a developing country it really shouldn’t be even in the same ballpark as america’s 70 years.)

core lecture today was on the peking opera, which was interesting.

did math yesterday, that was interesting as expected.

Oh, and went to a combinatorics lecture this morning. It was by Prof. Han. turns out he’s fairly famous though I didn’t remember that I’d heard of him until I got into the lecture. (it was the same topic that I’d got to a lecture frosh. year from a guy called igor pak from mit. that lecture went totally over my head – I couldn’t understand him even though he was explaining it in english.)

This one was a bit better (although in chinese.) although I still feel like I’m missing a big chunk. It’s on the hook length theorem, which this guy proved and then made several important conjectures. The combinatorics part is that these conjectures turn out to be really general and prove basically everything as specific cases.

I found out about the lecture in a post on the BBS. it turned out to be on the fifth floor of the main academics building in a small conference room. There were 5 profs and 5 grad students and me. (the prof is a chinese guy who is teaching in france right now btw.)

it was definately interesting stuff. I think that the style of the lecture was at least as cool as the content, since I can’t say I really internalized much of that.

otherwise – well, homework is done for this week. I’ve got a bag of sweetpotato chips I picked up fresh from a street vendor that I’ve been snacking on and are delicious.

my phone just got it’s first problem. I think the internal “is your face next to the phone” sensor broke, which means that I can talk but the internal speaker doesn’t activate (I can’t hear the other person). So I have to either turn on speakerphone or plug in headphones. Not the end of the world but a minor nuisance.

got up at 7. Class in the morning was fine. We went over the new lesson as expected.

Came back, wrote out the characters for tomorrow, and talked to my parents for a bit online.

Went to my afternoon class – the one delayed from friday, and we talked about our newspaper articles. Our homework for this friday is to watch a TV episode and explain in in class.

Came back in the evening. Decided to do something since class tuesday isn’t until the afternoon. Took the subway down to wangfujing (the upscale area.) Walked over to DongHuaMen, but couldn’t find the night market that was supposed to be right by that gate.

Walked back over to wangfujing, and found something on my way over, although I think it was a wangfujing night market and not the donghuamen market.

There was a large area of nightmarket foods, I sampled a starfish, since I’ve never seen those for sale before. It didn’t taste like anything special, the inside was reminiscent of crab, but it wasn’t that easy to get to the meat.

There were lots of exotic foods there, skewers with seahorses, and scorpions (some live ones even.) bugs of various types, and then more normal pieces of animals. Also sea urchins, again not entirely sure how you eat those.

Got a big calligraphy brush on my way back in a side alley. Probably paid a bit much for it at $150 kuai, but they were asking for 400 so it still felt like a victory.

Came back at around 11:30, and went to bed

got up fairly early.

Did a bit of Chinese homework and checked the web before leaving at 9.

We went on a tour of the forbidden city. The place is cool, but always flocked with tourists, and there’s really not that much to say about it that isn’t obvious. I mean, it’s where the emperor lived for a couple dynasties, and you can see the various chambers that receptions were held in – but what’s more impressive are the courtyards and the walls around the palace.

After we finished walking through it, we got back on the bus and drove to the east of the city somewhere for lunch.

Lunch was huge, two ducks (they were different types, although I couldn’t really tell the difference. They came with different sauces that you could eat them with.) The roast duck is really just excessive in my mind to some extent, and it’s still not my favorite food. For each duck you get three plates, one plate of skin, one of skin and meat, and one of just meat. The meat one is the one I like the most, although the skin is the delicacy. It’s pure fat though, which is why I find it hard to eat. We also got a bunch of other food, the potatoes were good, as was the beef soup, the lily, the mushrooms with hot peppers, and the eggplant.

Took the bus back after lunch and got back to campus at two. took a nap in the afternoon since I was full from lunch.

Spent the evening doing homework, got my essay for Thursday written, did the chinese homework and finished studying characters, and got another email sent out for my disp. Pretty productive day, overall

didn’t do that much today, it was bleak and raining or threatening to rain all day.

Wrote out the chinese characters and did the homework. Wrote out my part of a group essay due thursday (a few pages). Wrote out the calligraphy homework for next week and did some math.

Met with my tutor in the afternoon, and read through a newspaper article and then talked with her about school in china. I’m supposed to write a ‘story’ about an aspect of growing up / school experience that is different in china and the US. A really weird assignment, since it begs for a comparative essay rather than a ‘story’.

Spent the evening doing research for my disp online. The wholesale distributors for DVDs are quite elusive, but I was able to find that the wholesale price is 4-5 kuai, and then they’re typically resold for 6-10.

Rebecka showed up in the afternoon with a rabbit that she’d bought of the street. I’m not sure exactly how that’s going to work out…

After the forbidden city tomorrow I’ll try to get out and get some of the things on my todo list checked off, I should have most of the afternoon free, and don’t have much more studying to do.

Got up at 8.

First up was going to a CS talk. It was by a cornell prof. on concensus theory. He actually made it quite interesting, although it’s a field of CS that I probably won’t end up using much in my career. It’s dealing with how you can have a collection of unreliable processors come to agreement on a value. It’s used by google / yahoo / any other large cloud computing system. He did a nice proof of why the problem was impossible, and then a few examples of how you could implement solutions if you added additional restrictions (typically a maximum number of faulty hosts.)

Went back to the dorm, did work on my disp and got myself organized over lunch, and then met with my disp tutor mid afternoon. We went around to a few DVD shops in the area and interviewed the shop owners about their feelings of movie distribution. They all said their movies were ‘legal’ and it sounds like it may even be true much to my surprise – the deal as I understand it right now is that Chinese dvd suppliers work under much the same system as russian music, that is there is a flat fee artists association that can be payed rather than actually dealing with foreign license holders. They said legal dvds might go up to 12kuai but were still quite cheap.

had hotpot on campus for dinner, it was really good.

Then in the evening went to a chinese acrobatics show. (The program bought us all tickets for the show, it was at least as cool as the one I saw last time in shanghai, the stuff is ridiculous.)

Came back afterward and hung out for a bit, heading to bed now.

Got through classes for a couple more days. I like the new book, it’s got a lot of useful words in it.

Obama won the presidency, there was lots of talk among the group about that. Lots of liberal arts kids who are quite invested in politics.

went to jinwuxing street market today, and got some pens. It’s a bit south of wudaokou on the zhongguancun east road. A cool place, stuff seemed quite cheap in general.

Rescheduled my friday class so that I can go to a lecture on computer science (I think) tomorrow morning. Hopefully it’ll be interesting, it’s by a cornell professor. Then disp stuff all afternoon.

Math this week went fine, series convergence stuff. This math class overall is it turns out easier than the other upper division classes I’ve taken in terms of material. Benjamin typically has a reputation for being a harder prof, and this is the first upper division class i’ve taken not taught by him.

Not a whole lot else going on – the heat’s come on and my room is way too warm now.