Arrival and First day of class

I finally have both and internet connection and some spare time to give you all an update! Granted, the spare time is mostly because I'm still waking up earlier than needed, but at least I was able to sleep for most of last night.

I last left off when we were in Chicago, so I'll start from there.

The flight from Chicago to Beijing was not bad at all, it actually did not seem that long. One of the first things that we were greeted with when we got off at the airport was a group of about 30 cleaning ladies ready to clean the airplane up after us. Going through customs was not that bad, and before we knew it we were in a taxi on the way to campus.

I am extremely glad that I do not have to drive at all in Beijing. The taxi ride from the airport to the university was extremely scary. Our driver did not seem that bad, but people do the craziest things while driving. We saw cars stopping in the middle of two lanes on the highway, using the shoulder (which generally had people riding bicycles on it) to pass people, and just generally disregarding all road markings. I think we were glad to finally get to campus, where, although there is still some crazy traffic, it is generally not as bad.

Most of the rest of my first day here consisted of sleeping, which meant that I woke up at around 2 in the morning on Thursday. Tony and I got breakfast around 6, and then since no one else was up we wandered around campus for a while and saw No Name Lake and the water tower.

Thursday was our first day of class, and we got to meet our other 30 classmates from PKU. We have groups of three (one PSU student and two PKU students per group) for one of the class projects, so we got to meet our group members. I only met one of mine, and since the other one was not there, we "joined" another group to form a super group. I don't think we will be able to keep the super group, but it was nice to get to know more than just the one person in my group.

Class on the first day was interesting, and I can definitely tell that the schoolwork will not be easy. I definitely wish that I had at least some introduction to partial differential equations (I have only taken ordinary differential equations, which is the easier kind), since Professor Liu (from PKU, he is teaching the first part of the course) jumped right into the heat and wave equations, which I have never learned much about. Fortunately, it wasn't all impossible to understand, since a lot of what he was doing involved calculus, which I am more comfortable with.

After class, Professor Liu at lunch with us and the took us on a tour around campus. The campus is beautiful, especially the northern part where No Name Lake is. There are a lot of small ponds, secluded paths, and beautiful traditional buildings. I put pictures from this tour up on Facebook, and I will be putting them on my Freewebs page soon for those who don't have Facebook.

EDIT: Pictures are now up on http://picasaweb.google.com/sag5060 and will hopefully soon be joined by more

Thursday night we went with several of our PKU classmates off campus to the mall(s), where some of us got cheap local phones in order to communicate with each other while we are here. We went to several different buildings before we found what we were looking for, and each one was very different. There are some places that are more like malls you would find in the US, and then some that were like massive flea markets for electronics and other things.

While at the mall, we also went to McDonalds, which was a little odd. I have definitely never had a spicy cheeseburger before. I think I'll stick to real Chinese food, which has been very good so far.

Another post will be coming soon about our trip to the Great Wall, but right now I need to get ready for class (we wouldn't normally have class on Saturday, but we need to make up the class we missed from having our flight delayed)