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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.

Got up around 8. Spent the morning reviewing characters from the last week. Walked around campus when the attendants came to clean my room, but otherwise spent the morning studying.

The test didn’t go great, but I think they knew that would be true, because they didn’t exactly set us up for success this week. Two weekends where we couldn’t study and about twice the words as we’ve had previous weeks isn’t exactly optimal.

We’re starting the second book for the rest of this week; that’ll be interesting.

We had to spend the evening at a karaoke place as a ‘cultural activity’. It was fun, but also frustrating since we have a new lesson of characters to learn for tomorrow morning. The place had bad food, and the english songs were from the 80s. it was as I said before fun, I suppose, but also really would have worked better at a different time.

Came home and spent the evening studying for tomorrow’s class. Feel somewhat prepared, I’ll take another quick crack at them tomorrow morning before class.

出车祸 – chu1che1huo4 – to get into a car accident
受伤 – shou4shang1 – to become injured
严重 － yan2zhong4 – seriously
医院 － yi1yuan4 – hospital
病房 – bing4fang2 – ward
住院 – zhu4yuan4 – to be hospitalized
轻 － qing1 – not serious
腿骨头 － tui3gu3tou2 – leg bone
撞 － zhuang4 – to hit
折 － she2 – to become broken
绿灯 － lu4deng1 – green light
转 – zhuan3 – to turn
大概 － da4gai4 – probably
警察 － jing3cha2 – police
挺 － ting3 – quite
救护车 － jiu4hu4che1 – ambulance
保险 － bao3xian3 – insurance
负责医疗 － fu4ze2yi1liao2 – to be responsible for medical treatment
轮椅 － lun2yi3 – wheelchair
耽误 － dan1wu4 – to delay
要紧 － yao4jin3 – urgent
设备 － she4bei4 – facilities

Got up for class. had chinese class, the dictation went fine. We’re done with this book now, all 36 chapters, there’s a week quiz tomorrow, and then we start on the next book for wednesday.

Class was fine, although both me and sergio don’t have all the words fully internalized yet.

after class came back to the dorm for a bit. headed out around lunch time, and walked a couple blocks south to a ‘hyper-mart’ that I’d seen on the bus yesterday. It wasn’t all that exciting just a normal supermarket, but I wandered around the building which was also an electronics super-center.

came back at 1, and spent the afternoon getting work done. Studied chinese, got a batch of emails sent out for my research, and finally got some programming done.

went out to dinner with the group and got one of the common street foods. Crepe with egg fried on it, wrapped around a crunchy piece of bread and a piece of lettuce and hoisin+hot sauce. It was good.

It sounds like travel plans to tibet will be a bit tough, I got told that if I was planning that i’d probably need to go through a travel agent, so the plan now is back to heading south, which will also be fun. Next time I get some free time (looking like wednesdayish) I’ll start figuring out what needs to happen to get tickets. It’ll probably take a few days to withdraw the money once I get a price since I think I can only take out about 2000 rmb / day.

Oh, and decided on my schedule for next semester. Went for something fun, and not too challenging.

* CHIN 179 HM Visualizing Modern China
* CHIN 51B PO (Section 1) Intermediate Chinese
* (CHIN 013 PO Advanced Chinese Conversation) — I believe my speaking will be appropriate for this course, I have emailed the teacher to confirm
* CSCI 140 HM Algorithms
* CSCI 144 HM Scientific Computing
* MATH 172 PO Abstract Algebra 2: Galois Theory
* PE 001 JP 16 First Aid

3 science classes, 2 hum classes. (chinese conversation is a 1 unit no homework type deal.) Alegra 2 will build on my previous course a year ago, the other two are math / cs joint classes which will be cool – they’re both supposed to be good classes.

Forgot about this one, here’s the summary.

slept in. didn’t do much in the morning.

Around lunch time I went with jeremy down to the zoo area. Thats apparently one of the larger shopping areas in the city. We stumbled across what we thought at first was a bus terminal but turned out to be a 6 story street market. I got a pair of jeans, which is good since I only brought a couple pairs of long pants with me.

Came back at about 3:30, and found that the new vocabulary for monday was under my door. Spent the rest of the day studying them since there were 70 new words.

Got up at around 8. Spent the morning fairly relaxed. Studied some chinese. Did the calligraphy homework. Did a bit of math homework. Surfed the web and read the magazine I brought back yesterday.

Joe stopped by at lunch and invited me to go to a dumpling making event mid afternoon. Did a bit more studying until then, and then went over with him at two.

There were about 15 people, a mix of other international students (probably half) and chinese students. Everyone had really good english, so most of the talking was in english, but we made a bunch of dumplings.
This happened in the main dining area of the dumpling dining hall (one of the student cafeterias where the only thing on the menu is dumplings.) After we made them, the staff at the cafeteria cooked them for us, and we ate them. Lots of dumplings, and they were really good. The chinese student leader guy (his english name is mike) had made the fillings earlier, there was a eggplant one, an egg with ertou (a black mushroom that I haven’t seen in the US), a pork and radish, and a fourth one I’m forgetting.

Met a bunch of interesting people there, a chinese PHD student who’s working in Database design (there’s a project to build a new chinese optimized database starting with postgresql). There were also japanese and korean foreign students studying chinese, both of whom were already essentially fluent (they were doing research in chinese at least, and expected to be reading books.)

went back to the dorm and didn’t do a whole lot more this evening. Got a bit more studying done, and surfed the web for a while. I’m planning to go down to the main shopping area in beijing tomorrow since I haven’t been there. I haven’t been able to study the new chinese for monday yet either since they haven’t given us those words yet, hopefully I also get them tomorrow.

Got up at 8 ish.

Class was from 10 to 12 with Prof. Zhang. We spent the first half discussing the topics from the newspaper articles we chose. I chose one on the election,some claim that palin was sabotaging the republicans chances. Sergio brought in one on the industrial growth of XiAn.

The second half we read an article that Prof. Zhang printed out about how the milk crisis is affecting farmers. it was cool because for the most part we were actually able to read through and understand the whole thing. (As a note, it sounds like the current hypothesis on this is that everything we’re eating has melamine in it. Turns out that some derivative has been used in pesticide for a while and plants are metabolizing it.)

After class I headed over to alien street to see if I could get a Halloween costume. The last maps that I looked at for it mentioned that it was in the Russian district, but I didn’t really know what that would mean. I walked to where the place should be after getting off the subway, but there wasn’t anything there, so I walked around the side streets in the area for a while and eventually found it a couple blocks away. The area was full of fur shops filled with fur coats. Literally there would be full blocks that had nothing but these fur shops for the entire block, all with identical black fur coats.

The market was a 2 story affair full of stalls with stuff in them. It was a street market, just neatly packaged in the building. They did assume that foreigners were russian, and so the shouts to buy things came in russian rather than english. I eventually found one booth that halloween masks, but the masks were quite basic and they wanted a lot for them so I passed them on. Also in abundance were clothing, especially fur coats, bags, shoes, hats, glasses, fishing poles, toys, and more. I found eventually a zip up hoodie. It zips up all the way through the head, and has mario on it (the head has his head, the main front has his body). I got it, and was quite happy.

Wandered around a little bit more and then headed back to school. got there at around 5-ish.

Evening wasn’t particularly spectacular. I waited around for an hour or so seeing if there were people who were going to go for dinner off campus, but no group ever formed so I ended up getting some steamed buns for dinner, which were good as always.

In the evening people fooled around getting into costume for awhile, but eventually everyone was ready to head out. Our group had a panda, a biker, a pirate, a nascar driver, an artist, and a mario (me).

Went over to the cro’s nest, a pizza place near campus I haven’t been to before. Entirely foreigners there, making lots of noise and being generally roudy. I talked to one of the chinese tutors who’d come along while the others were roudy.

when the place closed at 11:30, I headed back and called it a night, the group didn’t quite have the cohesion to actually figure out anything to do for the evening.

I did pick up a ‘thebeijinger’ magazine at the place. It’s got a couple music events this month that I might try to go to (Armin Van. Bueren, DJ Shadow, and Wax Tailor). Additionally there was an ad for a second hand snowboard sale next week that I might try and got to.