Category: Post

Got up at 6:30, since it was hot in my room and their was a mosquito buzzing around my head. I got a couple bug bites on my face in the night, which was annoying.

Had class in the morning, which was alright.
In class, the teacher said that there had been a big sale going on over at wudaoko to the east of campus, so I biked over there. There wasn’t a sale, but I hadn’t explored the area before, so I walked around during the lunch period.

I stopped by the campus baozi place on the way back to get a quick lunch.

At two was the core class, this one was on business practice, where a business consultant talked to us. She said that she ran a course where she framed strategies in terms of the art of war, and gave a couple case studies on various similarities. One being the milk situation, and another being how foreign car manufacturers infiltrated the domestic market.

After the class was over, the program people showed up and talked to us about the weekend for a bit. We’ll be gone from tomorrow through sunday, so back either monday morning or sunday night. There’s an expectation for us to do research while we’re there, so I’ll be doing something related to my disp, probably looking at the differences in media consumption between city and countryside.

Next was calligraphy. We just talked for the three periods, and went through the older scripts that the original chinese writings were written in. We didn’t really do much besides look at how some basic characters have evolved between the three older scripts.

Next, I came back to the dorm. I wrote out the characters for monday, since I won’t have a chance while I’m away. I had a quick dinner, and then spent an hour doing review with my language tutor.

At about 9ish, after the language practice, I watched King of Kong with max and matt. Max had been wanting to see the movie for a while, and I remember enjoying it at mudd. It was better than I remembered, a very decent documentary.

Probably going to try and get a fair amount of sleep for tomorrow, and the adventure in the countryside.

Got up at 7.

Chinese class this morning.

Came back, finished up the math homework, and then started in on the chinese homework. There are about twice the normal amount of characters for tomorrow.

Got a bit of my disp homework done.

Went out for a couple hours in the afternoon to take a break. Ended up buying some hot chocolate for when i’m not in the mood for tea, and some ink for the calligraphy.

Came back this evening, wrote some emails, and studied the characters for a while. Also did the rest of the chinese homework.

Talked with people, and found out that pitzer has apparently a really flexible international studies major, and so maybe I could do a second major in that and have less work left. their catalog however is less than revealing and out of date. To be expected I suppose.

Edit: Looked again. You have to declare junior year, but there’s a class they say you should take as a freshman, what’s the deal with that? This seems ridiculously lenient, only needing like 7 classes of your choice to graduate. Mudd requires 12 though for off campus majors, good thing I’ll have that too.

Got up at 7, forgetting that there wasn’t class this morning. (tuesdays are afternoon class.)
Realized as soon as I got to the classroom, and headed over to the cafeterias for breakfast. Got a fried egg and some baozi, and then came back and wrote out the characters for tomorrow.

Spent the morning doing math homework for tomorrow, and studying through tomorrow’s homework. Ended up being fairly productive overall.

Went to class from 2 to 4, class was the normal with nothing particularly out of the ordinary.

Afterwards, came back to the dorm for a bit, spent a bit of time studying characters to get them more firmly into my head and then went out to dinner.

Had boiled hot peppers with meat and scrambled eggs which were quite good, just a little bit of bite left in them. Came back and headed over to the theater to see the play.

It was long, a bit over 3 hours. and was quite interesting. The dialog was not Shakespearean english, but rather a form of english that people who’d studied for 2 or 3 years got follow along with.

There were two vertical bars on the two sides of the stage with subtitles, although they often lagged behind, and there were a couple scenes where they accidentally got turned off.

The acting wasn’t bad, a combination of american and chinese actors. The chinese actors seemed to be students at the college, I don’t know where the americans/britons were from.

The set wasn’t bad, the stage is clearly well funded, the background was a full movie screen, as it had been in the orchestra, so they were able to take advantage of that. The other main set piece were curtains that were cut into vertical strips. They could be pulled by the actors seemingly to any point on the stage, since sometimes they would be clumped to form trees, and other times spread out to separate the stage into pieces.

Lighting and sound were also done fairly well, although the sound cues were a bit overwhelming sometimes.

The audience seemed to have mixed feelings. A bunch of people left at the intermission, probably mostly due to the poor subtitle tracking that had been going on leading up to that. I guess if you’ve spent the last hour not really understanding what was going on, it’s not really worth staying for another two.

Came back, have been busy for the last hour finishing up remaining bits and pieces, and figuring out what’s going on this weekend. We’ll be gone friday through sunday, and they want us to come up with a topic to do research into while we’re there. I’ll be working with matt and rebecca to look at the differences in propaganda and media consumption between rural and urban china.

Getting up early tomorrow, Need to do some work on my disp tomorrow especially, and also get prepared for the weekend.

new apple laptops should come out sometime tonight. From the rumors that have popped up this afternoon, they look like really nice machines. The dual Graphics could be a real boon, as will having a sturdy case on a small machine again (apparantly the 13″ will end up with an aluminum case rather than a plastic one.)

Got up at 7, had chinese class for a couple hours. The test and dictation were fine.
Came back, went through the next lesson. The set of new words for tomorrow is smaller than the past few days, which was nice.

Finished studying that mid afternoon; caught up on some emails later in the afternoon, also did some math homework.

Had dumplings for dinner, they were good, I added lots of garlic.

Went to taiji this evening. Not very many people there, so I did a somewhat abbreviated practice.

Came back this evening and found that most of the classes for next semester have been posted. Tried to figure out a schedule for the spring, although it all depends what happens with chinese. Sent my pomona professor an email asking what I should plan to do.

Hopefully I can do something like:
Chinese
CS 131 (programming languages)
Algorithms
Modern China (english Mudd Humanities course)
Graph theory / Advanced topics in Number Theory
PE
Advanced Chinese Conversation / CS Colloquium
(User Interface Design)

For 15 or 18 credits.

At 18 Credits, Remaining for the CS Major are:
Clinic (2 semesters)
Number Theory Or Scientific Computing

Basically, the deal is that if I can somehow take the chinese class to get through advanced chinese rather than through intermediate (count this year as getting through two years, either by starting in second half of advanced or doing a more intense schedule somehow) then It becomes very very possible to double major with chinese. There are essentially 5 classes I’ll need to take as a senior to complete everything, which would still mean only like 12 credits a semester.

It’s really about the practicality of being able to get through advanced chinese in the spring.

Got up at 8 ish, though I was a bit sluggish getting moving.

Spent much of the morning studying characters, although to a break midmorning to grab some food. It was a nice day; I finished watching the movie (a world without thieves) and the ending was quite good.

At 1pm, Lucia came over and we went over vocabulary for about an hour. Read over all the dialogs, and I am feeling reasonably ready for the test.

At 3, I met with Sun yu, my disp tutor. We met in one of the coffee shops on campus, and talked about the plan for research. We came up with task items, on my part mostly coming up with sets of interview questions, and doing some reading into IP law in both US and china. She was able to contact an independent film maker she knows, and also said that interviews with street vendors and consumers would be easy to get. When I have free time I’ll try and track down some other interesting subjects, hopefully some of the professors that wrote maze, the large online p2p network.

Came back for a bit, watched ‘the guild’ with sergio and rebecca while studying some of the next lesson. Went out to dinner after that.

Got back at about 6:30, and left after a few minutes to go to the orchestra concert I was signed up for.

It was quite good, there was a full orchestra, and it seemed that one of the violin players was a special guest of some sort.
Most of the songs were disney themes or orchestrations of music, the schedule was:
Pocahontas
The Land Before Time / Dinotopia (one of the two)
(possibly pipi long stoking)
Lotus Lantern
Lion King (Can you feel the love tonight)
Snow White
Black cat
-intermission-
Mulan
Aladdin (A whole new world)
Finding Nemo
Tom & Jerry
Tarzan
(possibly Swan Princess) in three acts

In most cases I didn’t recognize the songs, and the rather than having a single movie clip playing there were a montage of clips accompanying them.
Overall, quite fun.

Came back home at like 9:30, and finished previewing for the 13th lesson, and did another pass through the other 4 before bed.

Got up at 8 am. Got a bit of chinese studied, while waiting for the day to begin at 9:30. At 9:30, I got on the bus to go to the 798 art area.

This area is one of the major creative districts in beijing. It was originally a factory area on the outskirts of the city, but the cheap rent for space attracted lots of artists, and now it’s entirely an art area.

The bus got there probably at 10:30ish, and we had until 4pm to explore. I wandered off by myself for most of the time. The art was cool, a lot was painting, and most of that was fairly traditionally styled – not that exciting to me. There were several paintings that were quite cool, and much of the mixed media or larger installations were really cool.
(many places had no-photography signs, so I didn’t get quite as many pictures as the place deserved.)

Stuff was quite expensive, tourists coming probably in general stick to the basic gifts like t-shirts and books, so those were exorbitantly priced (like $120 kuai for a tshirt), while the actual art prices were cheaper than one might expect to find in the US.

I ran into mary and her tutor and we stopped for a late lunch / snack. The place we ended up at tried a little bit too hard; the ‘salsa chips’ turned out to be individual chips with a small square of cheese, a dab of strawberry jelly, a sliver of ham, half a cherry tomato and a slice of olive on each.

Some of the more exciting things I saw were a store for bandi panda, which I’d seen in the US (artist that takes pictures with a stuffed panda toy), and lots of prints of a guy who takes portraits of himself in impossible places. (forgetting his name.)

Came back to the dorm uneventfully, and met with my tutor for an hour shortly afterward. We mostly did conversation on the last four lesson (the ones I’ll be tested on for monday.) We’re meeting again tomorrow to read through the essays provided.

Studied some more characters, and then spent an hour and a half doing taichi. I finally figured out where the taichi people meet, which is in a gym I haven’t been to before. the deal is that the gym has the center separated from the track, and the middle of the gym is used for badmitton courts. From the 8:30 – 10 period the track on the edges is opened up for taichi and taikuando and the like, so there were lots of little groups practicing, as well as several larger ‘class-like’ sessions going on.

I’m still not quite as flexible in some ways as I should be, but if i’m able to stick with it, I ought to get better.

Came back, watched part of the movie ‘a world without thieves’, which was assigned as homework over the weekend. It’s quite good so far. Continued studying characters as well. Another fairly busy day tomorrow; so I’m not going to stay up any later tonight.

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.