Category: Post

I was woken up at 5:35 by a knock on my door. I had meant to get up at 5:25, but had accidentally set my alarm for pm rather than am. I still was perfectly fine, and got to the bus without problems. We got to the airport just a bit before 7. The plane left at 7:50; sergio forgot his passport, and grabbed a cab back. In the end we all made it on the plane without problems. The plane was nice, despite being a 1.5 hour flight. We got breakfast (hot, porridge), sandwiches, and drinks. Some of the kids on the trip are starting to annoy me a bit, but I’m managing fine.

Our destination was hebei, in anhui province. The flight landed without issues, and the airport there was a much smaller deal that in beijing. The baggage carriage was just a circular caracal, and the workers loaded bags off the plane onto carts and manually brought them over to the caracal.

We were met by a tour guide of some nature, and a quite nice bus. I claimed the back row and took a nap for the first part of the road. The road was pretty bumpy, and all together about 3 hours. We passed through a lot of toll booths, also over the yangsi river. There was a point about half an hour before we ended where the road was out, and we were just driving over a dirt road. The road was very empty the whole way. Probably because the main holiday is next week. The last 30 minutes was driving along a two-lane road that switch-backed steeply up the mountain. We probably gained quite a bit of elevation in that part.

At the end we ended up in a place somewhat like lijiang. Lots of small narrow streets with cobbled tiles, and like almost all the shops were incense dealers. We stopped in a little hotel, dropped our stuff, and then went to lunch. Lunch was good, the eggplant was good, as was the fish. After lunch we walked around two temples. The second one was really, really good. there were about 500 steps up to a ridge, and really cool fog shrouded mountains up at the top.

The place was flooded over with old ladies on pilgrimage. They were all over, lighting incense and kowtowing to as many of the buddhas as they could. It was a pleasant trip, lots of cool places, and the environment around us was really pretty.

We walked back down, and my camera ran out of batteries, so of course the rest of the walk back to the hotel I was seeing pictures I wanted to take. I changed batteries, walked out to a few shops to look at the incense and got some roasted chestnuts. It started raining a bit, finally making up it’s mind from the mild drizzle we’d had all afternoon. We retreated back into the hotel, and talked for a few hours before heading in. We’re getting up at 7:00 am tomorrow to go up the back side of one of the mountains. They say it’ll be about 8000 steps, which should be pretty exciting.

I woke up at 7:30 as is routine now. Went to chinese class which was about the same as always, and did fine on the exercises, as expected. During the break, we asked prof. wang where she was from, and she said she was from harbin. I asked about skiing, and she said that the two best ski resorts were by harbin, one right nearby and the other was it’s own resort a bit further away. She gave me the names of the two places, one is ‘er long shan’ and the other bigger one is ‘ya bu li’ (ski area is ‘hua xue chang’ Ôºè ʪëÈõ™Âú∫) After class ended at 10, I decided that I’d waited long enough and ought to bite the bullet and get some computer speakers while I was here. I walked down to the dianzi dasuan at zhongguancun, to look for speakers. I stopped by the hivi booth, which online makes upscale is recommended for upscale speakers, but they wanted the same 400 USD for their speakers I’d seen online, which seemed like a lot for two speakers that are only connected via an 1/8th inch jack. I ended up getting a pair of Edifier R1900T2’s, which are really nice. (580 kuai / $85 usd, they go online for about $100 usd). They’ve got rca inputs, and are decent sized bookshelf monitors, and to my ear they sound great, definitely way better than the internal laptop speakers. It was about 11:45 when I got them setup and back to the dorm. They are pretty heavy, and it was a bit of a walk, also some of the blue ink on the outside of the box rubbed off on my shirt, but washing it will probably fix it.

I went to lunch with sarah, who was heading out at the same time as I was. We went to the three specialized cafeterias, I got a chicken sandwich from the ‘western style’ cafeteria that was very passible, and she got a plate of fried rice with egg.

After lunch, I hung around the dorm until class started at 1:30, it was another one of those awkward time slots where there wasn’t quite enough time to go out and do something. I did transcribe the next set of chinese characters into my notebook so I can study it in anhui.

The lecture at 1:30 was by a professor of political studies at the university. He talked about the chinese government. (Definitely not communist, probably more capitalist than in the US) and about the historical precedent that went into that. There was a lot of interesting material in the lecture, I’ll try and summarize briefly.

China has less labor protection and more competition in most markets than the US or europe. China is also the only country that is still using a pictorial and not an alphabetical language, everyone else uses an alphabetical language (that is anyone at least, he talked about how korea and japan are both using alphabetical systems now.) China feels it’s influenced the west more than it has been influenced, consider the prodigious number of chinese restaurants in the US, versus the KFCS and such that have been constrained to only the major tourist cities in china. China is technically still a poor country, in that the per capita income is less than $3000 / person, but china does way better than the other countries at this level (brazil, the rest of asia). As a result germany and japan have stopped giving china aid as an under developed nation.
The poorness is due to the rural population, (which is migrating to the cities at 1%/year) because they are very self sufficient, but it is unlike the poverty seen elsewhere. The poverty line is $2 / day, and these farmers don’t have that, but they are self sufficient, have homes, decent clothes, and their own land.
State control is dissed by western powers as a monopoly, but allows for efficiency in crucial areas. In china, the state manipulates the market, while in the US the market manipulates the state. He mentioned that in the british opium wars, the drug traffickers were able to persuade the british navy to invade for their profits.
China has been forced into being the world’s factory, as a result of it’s large labor force, they feel backed into a corner in terms of pollution and the like, because as the factory they are clearly the ones doing the work leading to pollution, but it is the western countries that set up the factories and need to take responsibility for them.

He talked for a while about the structure of the government, and how the government interrelates with the communist party. The party these days is an elitist party, and they don’t have a problem with that. You can only join the party if you are already a leader, and an excellent scholar.

The basis of all this is that for the last 2300 years, china was a family based country. There were a total of about 150 government officials over the whole country. there was no passage of wealth, land was split equally among sons, and no rich family could persist more than three generations, because if you were rich you would have many sons, and so the land would be divided more, and they would each end up at the same place as a common person. in terms of leadership it was pragmatic, everything was through merit and the government exams, because there was no need for the emperor to really do much beyond be smart and make good decisions for the empire.

After Class, I went back to the pitzer office. There is a group of kids that are staying longer in anhui, since there is a national holiday when we get back. I decided to come back to beijing, because I think it’s easier to explore and such here, than when stuck with a large group of people who can only speak english in a foreign area. The program said they really need to get their tickets back because since it’s a holiday back they’ll have trouble, I’m again glad I’m going back with already reserved tickets. I talked with the director about additional traveling this semester. She said that they could and probably would move one of the activities so an earlier weekend freed up, so that we can go up and visit innner mongolia before it gets too cold. I also asked here about going to hua shan, and she said that it was pretty dangerous and suggested tianzishan instead. The pictures of that one look really cool.

at five was the final taiji class. They gave us pieces of paper with pictures of us doing the various poses they’d taken on wednesday. Then we met with a group of taiji students from the university. I talked for a while with a phd student from tsinghua university who is doing high energy physics. He’s hoping to do a post doctorate at stonebrook, and then work at the LHC. We watched the main taiji instructor do some taiji, and then dispersed.

I headed to dinner with a fairly large group, I got beans with potatoes, and cucumber with chicken, overall not bad but pretty bland.

After dinner I we stopped by the supermarket, now that the olympics are over there’s a dvd shop setup outside, and I found a documentary on miazaki I didn’t know existed, so I picked it up for $8 yuan.

I came back to my dorm, showered, did some various preparation for tomorrow (packing, etc.) and am heading to bed. Got to get up at 5:30 tomorrow. In terms of health, I’ve got some post-nasal drainage, which means a slight cough, but it’s nothing major, and very controllable. Overall, not a very bad cold.

Got up at 7:30. Today wasn’t hot for once, with a light drizzle on the walk over to class. Class was fine again, continuing the drill from earlier. During break I went to get a snack, and saw the seaweed wrapped rice cakes in the foreign student shop. They wanted $5 for it, which is ridiculous, and I have decided not to get anything from them again, because the cakes aren’t worth more than $1.

After class, walked back to my dorm, and studied plus homework. I still had the two parts of the math problem, and really didn’t make much progress on that. I did get all the various papers that have been accumulating scanned into my computer. I also searched the internet a bit and discovered some independent chinese artists, and finished my homework for thursday.

At 3:30, my math teacher came over. He had gotten the email I had sent yesterday, and had prepared the two problems to go over with me. A lot of time was spent translating the various terms, the ones I remember are
Supremum = 最小的上界 (literally: the smallest upper bound)
Suppose = 说明
A is an element of B = A在B中
Derivative = 微分 (literally: Small cuts)
Integral = 积分
Calculus = 微积分
(also 啥 ＝ 什么, apparently a dialectical shortening)
Rationals = 有理数
Integers = 整数
b^r = b的r次方
b^2 = b的平方
b^3 = b的立方

It was really interesting. And I’m glad I’m doing this. He left me with the chinese version of the textbook, which is apparently also used in china, and said I could borrow it for the semester. We decided to skip next week since I’ll be gone, and reconvene the week after.

After meeting with him it was time for dinner, I got green beans with chicken pieces, and a sweet bun for desert. I went with a larger group from our program, the first-year students were complaining that their teacher was too strict and pushing them too hard. I got to smile inwardly at that.

I came back, transferred my old math work over to my laptop from home, because I wanted to show the guy that I’d taken an abstract algebra class, but couldn’t really convey what we’d studied.

I read through Chinese stuff again, wrote up various things that needed to be written up, and managed to pass the time without being too board. I have a pretty decent grasp on the characters for tomorrow.

I got up at about 7:30 again, I suppose it’s become a habit by now.

I spent the morning on the internet for the most part, since I basically knew the words for the day.

I did get all but one of my math problems done in the morning.

At 11:30 I knocked on sergios door and we went and got lunch before class. We went to yet another campus restaurant, this one a small take-out place. Sergio got a crepe-like thing (you see them a lot around here, a thin layer of batter with an egg, some leek, that’s then wrapped around a crunchy piece of bread. I got a very good stir-fry, with rice, onions, beef, peppers, cabbage, carrots, etc. It was a bit more expensive than the common dining halls, but it also tasted somewhat better.

I spent some time trying to figure out how to run maze on my computer, eventually discovering that it wasn’t possible on macs. Maze appears to be the default way to share music on campus, it’s a p2p application developed by the university, and the cs department extracts usage information from the network and then publishes papers about the observed behavior.

Class was fine again, I’m still essentially on top of the material, so all’s good on that front.

After class we had a brief meeting with Prof. Wang (the director) about the plan for next week. She said that we would be touring a village and a mountain. Stuff is still pretty up in the air by the sound of it, they want us to stay in a monastery, but you can’t really book that, it’s just a matter of if they have space when you show up. we fly out to anhui on friday morning, and it should be quite a bit of fun.

Then was taiji class, he had us hold the poses a bit longer as a ‘final’, and then brought his teacher to show us what taiji looks like after 30 years, which was quite impressive.

finally, I came back to by dorm, drank some tea, and did the Chinese homework.

I basically am ready for tomorrow morning in that regard. I spent a couple hours working on the last math problem, but haven’t completed it satisfactorily yet. I’ll take another crack at it tomorrow after Chinese class, if I still can’t get it I’ll ask my tutor about it tomorrow when we meet for the first time.

Not a ton of news from today, other than that yesterday I went out to get snacks and picked up a bag of white rabbit candy, and today there was a news article that they also tested positive for the poison milk thing. I’ve only had a few, so now I’ve got a whole bag of candy that I can’t eat. sad.

Things are beginning to settle into a routine grind, and so there’s less out of the ordinary to talk about. School is as expected, and so doesn’t in my opinion warrant detailed explanations.

I woke up at about 7am, since I got to bed yesterday so early. I was feeling less tired, but my cold hadn’t gone away fully. I showered, took another look over the vocabulary, and went to class.

Class went fine, the first hour was spent taking two tests, first a written test on the first four lessons, and then a dictation on the fifth lesson. I got a 93 on the written test, missing points for not remembering a few characters. My dictation score was 91. I hadn’t realized exactly what the deal was with the dictation, and was taken off-guard by some additional vocabulary that I hadn’t realized I needed to study. The dictation is actually two sentences from the dialog associating each chapter, so in the future i’ll need to read through that the night before and find out if there are additional words used I haven’t learned yet.

The second hour was spent reviewing the various grammar patterns and words introduced by the fifth lesson. It’s fairly intense but doable. I think it will be more so once I’m over this cold.

Afterward, I went with sergio and steven to the computer center to buy internet access for our computers. I proffered $315 kuai, and after a lengthy discussion the two ladies at the counter asked me for $405 kuai. I told them I didn’t want to sign up for december, and after an equally length calculation, complete with long hand multiplication on the back of a sheet of paper, they came to the agreement that it would in fact be $315, which I gave to them.

I returned to my dorm, and had no problems accessing the internet. I wrote out the new vocab for tomorrow, and chatted with my parents for a while.

In the afternoon after studying for a while, I decided not to stay in my room all day, and walked down to the haibei area. It’s one of the places we went during orientation, and has the largest carryfour (a supermarket) in asia. I spent about an hour walking up and down the aisles and looking at the various things they had for sale. I eventually bought some kleenex for my cold, and some tea.

The way out of the store was somewhat confusing. I followed the exit signs, which resulted in a very long hallway that was bordered on each side by a variety of stores. It didn’t really seem like it’s own shopping mall, and the crowd was flowing out of the carryfour to the exit, which made it very strange that there were a good 50-80 stores there. I eventually exited and hurredly made my way back to campus because the clouds were threatening rain and I had brought my unprotected camera.

I still had an hour before taiji class, so I drank some tea and did some more studying.

Taiji was fine again, we have now learned three of the four poses that are represented in the large garden, there are two more classes before we finish the session. I biked over there today, expecting that it would be finished once the rain started and I wanted to get back as quickly as possible at that point. Instead it didn’t rain, but I got wet since the seat of my bike hadn’t dried from the previous day.

After class I went to dinner with sarah at yet another dining hall. I got a couple of steamed buns with strangely minty vegetables inside, and a bowl of rice and some sort of meat/tofu. The texture of the meat was somewhat off-putting but the sauce was good, so I suppose the meal was a success. We talked about pitzer and how they didn’t seem to be quite as organized about things as either of our schools.

After dinner, I came back did a couple math problems, wrote up my core homework for thursday, and finished getting the vocabulary for tomorrow into my head. I drank more tea and am increasingly happy with my choice which was the cheapest of the three gunpowder teas they had available (tea leave rolled into little balls that unfurl once water is added).

I’m going to bed early again since I’m tired, and even though I don’t have class tomorrow until 2pm.

we just got news that there will be a meeting at 4:15 tomorrow to discuss the deal with traveling to anhui this weekend, it should be interesting.

I woke up at 7:30 again for taiji. I definitely have a cold, which is too bad, but hopefully I’ll get over it soon. Taiji class was fine, he got through showing us the movement he wants us to make, but said it not really be reasonable to expect all to be good at it in 10 days. I do feel more flexible though, I can touch my toes without effort if that’s any sign. I rode my bike over to the class area, and then rode back to the dorm afterwards. I didn’t really get out much today, and mostly sat at my computer and felt sick. The weather outside was raining all day, which didn’t exactly help matters.

I did get out for lunch, (chao mein / fried noodles) which I had no complaints about, and stopped on my way back to pick up some white rabbit candies, and a pair of slippers, which are actually quite comfortable. Even though I wasn’t hungry I went out in the evening and got a bowl of chicken soup that tasted good.

During the day I worked on various studious things for the most part. Spent a good time going through and working on memorizing the characters so far. The new teaching style where we’re supposed to learn the characters before class Isn’t quite as easy for me to get a hang of, so those ones aren’t quite as clear in my mind yet. The other ones are all pretty much there for the test tomorrow.

I also did a few of my math problems for this wednesday, (along with the reading) wrote up my disp proposal for my Intellectual Property assignment and sent that it, and wrote most of my first assignment for my core class. (A letter reflecting on the scavenger hunt during orientation.) I also signed up for the universities bulletin board system and spent quite a while reading through posts there. It’s quite interesting, and I’m able to decipher at least some of it. There’s a skiing club, and lots of freshmen asking about where to buy things. (The skiing club goes elsewhere to ski for the most part, there’s an indoor ski area in beijing though.)

I drank a lot of tea, Noticed that my what.cd account is now power user, which means I’ll start getting invitation for that site next month.

All in all a pretty quiet day, I didn’t really have much energy, but hopefully I’ll do better tomorrow. I’ll post this tomorrow, since internet isn’t working right now. I’ll be able to buy legitimate internet tomorrow though.

I got up at 7:30 since we have taiji practice this weekend. Taiji was fine, we did half on the first movement. (we’ve been doing strength building and stances, now we’re working on a movement.) Many of my classmates looked tired, probably having been out too late last night.

After class I went to breakfast with sarah and alice. We went to the place advertising noodles. I got an egg and three small baozi (steamed buns / dumplings with some sort of pork filling.) and a cup of soy milk. Breakfast was quite decent.

I went back to my dorm, took a look at my map and decided to start biking east and see If I’d hit a lake. First though I stopped by the bike mechanic, and paid him two kuai to get the back break out of the way of the front wheel. He hit various pieces of the bike with a hammer until things weren’t getting in other things way. The bike ride was relaxing, and I got out to see a different part of beijing than before. I never really saw a main gate to either of the parks I was looking for, but definitely rode along the edges of a couple of them for quite a while. The bike threatened to fall apart on the way back, but all that happened was one of the metal poles connecting the back axle to the mud guard came off, and hooked into the wheel. I was able to bend it out of the way without any serious issues.

I came back to the dorm at about noon, looked over words a bit more, and then walked down to zhongguancun at about two with sergio and matt. zhongguancun is the major technology area just south of the college, and also a major general purpose shopping area.

We went through the main shopping mall, past a band that was setting up to play and already had a crowded audience in one lobby, and eventually found a pizza place. Sergio had been talking about pizza on the way down, so we decided to go there for lunch. The pizza was in general pretty westernized, as were the prices. I think really most of the mall was probably that way, as it all looked quite upscale. That’s not to say the food wasn’t good, it was, it’s just that it wasn’t anything you wouldn’t expect.

Afterward we walked over to the technology area. I directed us into a very skinny building that had cartoon characters all over the outside. There was an escalator on the outside that took us to the third floor, which was practically deserted, with psp shop near the entrance, and the rest of the floor blocked off. We walked up a floor, and found a typical although small marketplace. It also seemed pretty slow, with many empty store fronts, and not that many people. On the fifth floor were comic book shops, cosplay outfits, and various anime accessories. The sixth floor which was where all the people on the stairwell were heading turned out to be a cosplay restaurant, with the waitresses in various costumes. Since we’d already had lunch we made our exit.

We walked across the street to one of the larger electronic megastores. There wasn’t a specific purpose beyond reveling in the massive quantities of electronics available. I ended up talking for a while to a salesman at a shop hocking edifier speakers. He offered me their R1900 for between 560 and 750 kuai. (the first being under the price offered online, the second over; He had two different models that were both R1900, and I couldn’t quite tell the difference.) I ended up not getting anything, but sergio got a cheaper speaker system from the same shop. (A 2.1 for $160 that sounds decent)

On the way out I noticed a Hi-vi shop, and looking it up online, it turns out that hi-vi is a reasonably respected brand for upscale sound equipment. I’m thinking of going back there and seeing how much they want for monitors. (Then I looked at shipping and realized it would probably cost way more than the speakers to ship anything back to the states. – I guess I can bring one more bag back then I came here with)

We got back at 6-ish, actually I came back about 10 minutes before they did because I was walking faster than them, and got across one of the major intersections while they got stuck at it for a while, and decided to just head back.

I felt like I was getting a cold, so I took a shower and drank some tea, and fiddled around on the internet. I found some more interesting information on the campus network, it turns out that there are lots of easy sources of access to movies and music here, probably much more open than in the US. There are several big ftp servers that provide access to the campus, and the cs department actually has developed it’s own P2P network called maze that it encourages students to use. (sadly windows only.) They’ve actually published studies about network dynamics and user statistics because they are able to keep tabs on the network.

nobody else seemed to be doing much this evening either, although there’s talk of seeing a movie tomorrow. There’s taiji again tomorrow morning, and I’ve got some homework to get through this weekend that I didn’t really get done today. It was good to get out though.

I woke up late because class on Fridays doesn’t start until 10am. I grabbed another thing of yogurt that I got yesterday, and went over to class. We got a couple more packets of readings for the core class, and spent today reviewing the first four lessons. the homework for the weekend is study and know everything from the first 5 lessons; we’ll have a quiz on the first four, and then a dictation on the fifth.

After class I went back to the dorm, and then to lunch. We went to the sichuan dining hall, and I got green beans with pork. The bean here are quickly becoming one of my favorite foods. Most of the other people on the trip seem to prefer vegetarian options for whatever reason. (Probably because they’re mostly from pitzer) There’s a scrambled egg with mushroom dish that people get a lot, along with various tofu dishes that seem to be enjoyed.

After Lunch I walked over to the taiji garden and took some pictures of the statues that were on display there. I said hello to shanbin, the guy I’d talked with yesterday, and also to a girl who’s an english major in the taiji club. They told me how to sign up for the club, and I said I’d be back later in the afternoon with friends who wanted to sign up even more than me.

I came back to the dorm, uploaded photos from the last few days, and studied a bit of chinese.

At Three I met with my language tutor, lucia, in front of the supermarket. I asked if we could first go over to the computer center and get my internet connected, and she was happy to help me with that. We first walked to the first floor office, which said that it was there to get student cards, and since I was a foreign student I didn’t get a full on card. They directed us to an office on the second floor. The lady there said that she didn’t know what to do with us. Lucia called Prof. Zhang, and asked what was up, and got told that information on what to do had been sent yesterday. After a heated discussion with the lady there, we were told to go up to the third floor. On the third floor another lady didn’t know what to do, and pointed us to an office on the other side of the floor. The person who was supposed to be in that office wasn’t there.

So we waited there for a couple minutes, and then the lady from the second floor showed up, and said the guy we were waiting for was on the second floor, so we went down to where he was, and he said that he needed to run off somewhere but would be back in ten minutes. In the meantime, Prof. Zhang showed up, and talked with the lady behind the office on the second floor.

They ended up not having a problem, but said that If we came back on monday it would cost $45 less for this month. I asked if there was a way to just sign up for the basic $30 plan for this month, and they said that there was a deal with the foreign student office where foreign students needed to pay for full international internet if they wanted anything. I decided to come back on monday. (One of the girls bought some sort of $10/day plan for this weekend, and I set up her computer as a wireless provider, so most of us are using that for now.)

I went back to my dorm with lucia, and studied chinese for an hour and a half. I read through all the characters so far, and practiced tones, and then we had a chinese conversation focusing mostly on the poisoned milk situation. (Very serious, it’s spread from powder to all milk, and they’re recommending that if you want milk you should only get it from nestle or 100kuai)

Then it was time for taiji class, We went to the field next to where we normally practice since the club is doing it’s display this weekend. We spent time looking at the statues, and then the teacher had us do what we’d learned so far in front of his teacher, who seemed to sign off on it. We ended class a bit early, and went into the taiji practice building, where there was a second display, where slightly larger versions of each of the types of statues were painted and displayed. There were also lots of explanations of what was going on with english translations.

After taiji, I came back to my dorm and did a first run through all the characters in the 5th chapter, that I need to learn for monday. I spent a while looking at the chinese internet, and ended up watching CCTV4 on my computer. (The College has a technical initiative to get IPV6 in use in the core chinese universities. What they’re providing to help the uptake is that access to IPV6 sites is free even when you aren’t signed up for an IPV4 plan, and they provide free streaming television over IPV6. They had all 10 cctv channels available, and also a for whatever reason were hosting a large site of movies and television programs that can be streamed. It’s very different from the US, where the college wants to stay as far away from that stuff as possible because of possible litigation. Here, I’ve seen large banners advertising the tv.pku.edu.cn subdomain where you can watch tv from you computer.

That was most of the day, I Went through email for a bit, and talked chatted with some of the other other participants. A bunch of them went out to drink, but since there was taiji class at 8 on saturday I didn’t really think that was a great idea. I looked through a map and decided to try and walk around the kunming lake and summer palace tomorrow.

I got up this morning at about 7:30. It was nice that we’re now right next door to classes, because it means that you don’t end up at class tired, and you get an extra 30 minutes of sleep.

We’re switching professors for the rest of term, Prof. Zhang is too busy with the other duties of being assistant director to also have 10 hours of teaching a week, so my new teacher is Prof. Wang. (Wang Li). She seems to be stricter that Prof. Zhang, we’re going to have daily dictations, and she expects to to have learned the characters in the next days lesson before coming to class each day.

The class was fine today, we went over characters in the fourth lesson, and she quizzed us and had us make sentences around all of the grammar points.

After class I went back to my room, and wrote out all of the characters, and began to study them a little bit. I also took a short nap.

At 2pm we had our first core class. it was taught by Prof. Gong. He is a journalism Professor, who has been to America a couple times, and taught at Berkley for a couple years. He went through a brief history of china in the two hours, covering a little bit of Confucius, going through the opium and Japanese wars, and then looking at the reconstruction, formation of bejing daxue, and got up to mao’s rise to power. It was an interesting history lesson.

After that class one of the tutors came in to tell us what the deal was with the internet. It’s sort of an interesting situation. The basic deal is that for 30 kuai / month you can get internet access to the chinese web. For another 30 / month you get 80 hours / month to the english web, or for 90 / month you get full access to the english web. There’s a pro-rating discount if you wait until after the 20th of the month to sign up, which is why they’ve been telling us to wait until the 21st to deal with stuff. On the same note the ethernet port in my room got fixed after I complained yesterday.

My current plan is to stop by tomorrow, and sign up for chinese internet for the rest of the month. (that also includes gmail). Then I’ll get full internet starting in october.

After the internet discussion we walked over to taiji class. We went through the same exercises as before, and then got into the specifics of the first pose. Near the end of the session, there was a group of older chinese ladies in the next park over who were doing some form of taiji. One of the girls who didn’t speak chinese wanted to know what it was, so I asked another member of the taiji club who was practicing nearby. He didn’t know, but then as we were leaving asked me how long I’d been studying chinese. We ended up talking for quite a while, he expressed that it was really hard to explain this stuff in english, because while our instructor had just been saying to keep things level, or to stay straight, the real point was to keep various acupoints aligned. There was an older lady (an aiyi) who had also been following along with us during our lesson, and he worked with both of us in chinese for about half an hour going over the stuff we’d learned before.

He also spent quite a while working to express to me how the exercises related to yin and yang, and how you had to make sure that you’re movements didn’t go too far in one direction. There was a lot of vocabulary around the subject that I haven’t heard before, but it was still really interesting stuff.

We ended by doing a second pose, that I couldn’t really hold for more than a second. You squat down completely with all your weight on the heals, and your upper body rigid, which means that it’s quite difficult to keep from falling over backwards. Then, in that braced position you transfer all of your weight to one leg, and push the other out until the knee is straight.

I got back to my dorm at 7, did another crack at the homework (got through the writing and just need to finish learning characters.) Then I walked over to the supermarket and got some yogurt and crackers to snack on.

Internet, well, for now internet remains intermittent. I’m using an open wireless network that means I’m partially connected. The deal is that the port the wireless router is plugged into has been enabled, but since my computer isn’t logged in anywhere, I can’t theoretically access the internet. The trick is that you can access the .pku.edu.cn domain. One of the things I found there was that there is a second route out to the internet, one that you don’t have to pay for. The problem is that the second route is an IPV6 route. What this means is that I can’t access google.com, but I can access ipv6.google.com. It does mean I can’t access gmail, since there is no IPv6 address for it. For sites that don’t need authentication, you can also proxy your IPV6 communications through a service offered by sixxs.org, which is how I’m typing this. (my url is willscott.name.ipv6.sixxs.org). It’s a pain, but I really only need to get access to my email beyond what I’ve got now.

I don’t have class tomorrow until 10am, which will be nice to sleep in. I still have a bunch of characters from this lesson to learn, like ‘fence’, and ‘roof tile’, and ‘to renovate’, but I ought to be able to get it done. If all goes well, I’ll be able to post some photos tomorrow, but we’ll see.

Got up at 7 again this morning. Took my backpack down to the hotel lobby, as the program had arranged to move our large bags for us. I took my two smaller bags with me and walked over to the classroom. (I was a bit early, and got there at about 7:45 for an 8:00 am class). The weirdness I had noticed earlier with white barricades along the roads was even more evident as a I walked through. There was no security I had to pass through to get on campus, but that might had just been luck. (normally you have to show your id card to open the closed campus of 50000 people.) Prof Zhang came in right at 8, and said that sergio would probably be late because everything was blocked off for the marathon that was going through campus. I guess shortly after I walked over, the holes in the gate got closed and everyone got told to find another way in, because the main road through campus was only for the marathon runners.

Sergio showed up about 15 minutes late, we had our dictation, and then went through another 20 or 30 new words for the rest of class. Mostly having to do with banking and phone calls.

After class, we gave Prof. Zhang our passports and a room deposit. I hung around the office for a little bit, not entirely sure what to do, but talking with steven, sarah, and alice discovered that they were heading out to buy bikes. I joined them and we walked to a market to the north west of campus with steven’s tutor. In a back alley we found a bike show that the tutor knew of, and found four bikes in working condition. They cost 100/bike, which isn’t that bad, and my bike works and feels like it’s worth about $15 usd. The brakes aren’t like anything I’ve seen in the US, but the tutor was happy to see them, saying they were much stronger than the typical brakes. (this is the mechanism not the actual brakes which are still pads against the wheel rim.) The difference is that rather than a wire that gets pulled, there are actually solid metal rods that move to apply pressure.

I got the bike, the others spent a long time finding bikes, and trying to get the bikes adjusted properly, I sort of figured that my bike felt comfortable enough and for the time I’ll be using it I don’t really need to worry about the exact seat height. I rode back, the bike didn’t break at all, so that was good.

I biked over to the lake and did the first bit of my chinese homework for the day, came back at about 2:10 and there was a sign on the office saying that we could move in at 2:30. So I biked around campus for 20 minutes. I actually like the bike reasonably well. The chain came off once, and was annoying to put back on, since there’s a chain guard that makes it hard to reach. The bike itself is very well shocked, and managed to go over the quite rough streets without too much efforts. It’s also very heavy, which means that it can coast for quite a while on the downhills.

I got back at 2:30, got my key, and moved to my room. The room is a suite, with a large room, a small room, and a bathroom. I guess it’s supposed to be shared by three people. I took the small room, which had a desk and a dresser in it. The big room had two beds and a TV, but really didn’t have any other furniture in it. I unpacked in about an hour, and then discovered that there wasn’t internet.

There were several wireless networks, but only one was open, and it didn’t do anything when I connected. Additionally when I plugged into the ethernet port in my room I got a ‘network is unplugged error’, meaning that something was very wrong with that connection. (other people didn’t get that error, and while they also weren’t getting internet because you apparently have to pay for it, at least it felt like if they paid for it they could get it enabled.)

I took a crack at cracking one of the WEP networks, and did so successfully in about 15 minutes. The problem was that once connected There were no other computers on the network, and it itself wasn’t connected to the internet and hence was a false leed. I started taking packets for the other network nearby but it was WPA encryption, and I didn’t have much hope of getting a key for it. (WEP is broken, WPA is still pretty secure)

in the meantime I walked with steven and sarah and matt over to a cafeteria I’d never been to to get dinner. I got pork and greenbeans, which were very tasty, and some sort of cake like thing for dessert that was also really good. After dinner I came back, wrote my essay for tomorrow, and then fiddled around trying to get the internet to work. Eventually I found that the open network was connected to the main PKU internet, and so I spoofed my mac address to one of the ones I’d seen earlier (actually, one of the ones connected to the closed network I’d entered), and was suddenly able to connect. There’s just one but, and it was pretty big. That but is that I can only connect to .cn domains, and to google. My blog doesn’t work, my music doesn’t work, mudd’s website doesn’t work, it seems that anything that isn’t in china doesn’t work.

After spending lots of time doing google searches and trying to find information in the 1 line snippit of the results that I was allowed to read, I found google’s mobile proxy, and have been using that for this post. It’s official purpose is to reformat websites for mobile devices, but it also allows you to access US based pages despite the weird PKU filter.

I’m going to spend some more time studying characters, as the ones from today aren’t fully in my head yet.

Oh, I forgot to put this in: I met with my math tutor today. One of the tutors (the one who’s an EE major) knew the guy that TA’d for the PKU real analysis class last semester. We met briefly in Prof. Wang’s office, and he seems quite nice. We’ll meet every wednesday in my dorm room at 3:40 to discuss my problem set for the week, and answer questions I have. I can also send him emails if I have questions on things. I’ve finished the first week’s problem set without problem, and am starting on reading lecture notes towards the second one.

I’ll post a picture of my Bike soon, assuming I can bend the internet to my will for a bit longer.