Blog

Status: 7+/20

Spent the morning coming up with a thesis. Spent the afternoon at the library reading books on copyright law. Spent the evening figuring out stuff about travel plans (like that hiring a car was much more expensive than trains). Had a lovely dinner. talked with my host mom for a while. Wrote a bunch of my essay!

Hopefully I can get a draft finished tomorrow. That would also mean I don’t have to go outdoors too much. The high today was 0C, the low was -9… also it was windy. Brrr.

The homestay so far has been really fun. I really like my host mother, han lihong. She’s a lawyer dealing both as an adviser for companies, and has some experience in dealing with corruption of officials.

The food has been delicious and there’s always too much of it, which is custom.

I biked back to the university today, sadly one of my peddles fell off about halfway there which made the ride a bit less pleasant. I didn’t feel like stopping so I continued to the university somewhat awkwardly and got it fixed for 8 kuai (for a new peddle and shaft, since it turned out that the piece holding the peddle in was what had broken.)

Making progress on the disp and research, hope to get it done this week, and have next week free to explore the city.

I’m going to write as much of this as I can remember this evening before heading to sleep.

I met up with Jeremy, Max, and Rebecka at 4pm out front of our complex. We took a taxi to the subway station to our east (an easy bike ride, but a long walk) and then took the subway to the hilton. We got there just a bit after five. The event was above the main lobby area and covered two floors and several ball rooms. We walked around for a while before finding the official entrance (we’d come up the main marble stair cases, but the official check in was at the elevators) and picked up schedules and wine glasses.

We sampled for a while, there were booths from different distributors everywhere, roughly organized by region. Some of the larger distributors would have big corners where they had their whole range of wines that they were importing.

The event was primarily for people within the industry, who were doing things all day, the schedule started before lunch with coffee tastings. There were also a lot of representatives from hotels and upscale restaurants looking for new brands of wine to stock.

After making our way quickly around the third floor we stopped for a bit to get some food before continuing. The food was really good, lamb, salmon, prawns, etc.

I took off a bit early, and walked down to the second floor to explore the area. I ended up getting in a fairly long conversation with the director of marketing for ASC(I think) fine wines. He was a Spanish guy that took me through their whole range of wines, from Spain and France into their new world imports from Chile and Argentina. It was really cool, because he did a great job of explaining the different strengths of the wines, and so I was able to fit the vocabulary to the tastes.

I met up with the group for a while after that, and was happy to walk around and somewhat randomly sample different wines to get a sense of what the distinctions in grape types meant. I tried to take pictures of most of the bottles I tried, but failed miserably because there were so many, and it was so quick.

Essentially each booth would have a set of 8 to 10 different types of wine, a pitcher of water, and a bucket to pour out your extras. You’d take a sip of the types you were interested and then move on.

There were some less traditional offerings mixed in with the array of reds and whites. I remember a couple delicious desert wines from Australia, and there was also a booth that was showing off champaign based cocktails. I also got a chance to try absinthe, which was not what I was expecting it to be. (mind you, I didn’t get the elaborate preparation, it was just poured into a wine glass.)

At the end, the partially empty bottles are fair game, and the distributors hand them out to interested looking people, so I took a bottle of red and a bottle of white back with me. The red is a french 2007 Les Michelons Moulin-a-vent. I gave the white to max, because he decided to go back and get more to eat rather than stick around at the end.

It was a really cool experience. Even though we weren’t exactly the target audience, there were plenty of other people just walking around enjoying the wine so we didn’t feel out of place. It was a very classy atmosphere, and It felt like representatives from most of the classy restaurants and hotels were in attendance.

Took the subway back after it ended at 8:30, and then piled in a taxi back to the homestay. My family is still up, and were surprised at how early I was back.

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