Returnings

Well, I'm already back at home and almost settled in, so I guess it's time to finish posting about the remainder of my trip.

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of our last week in Beijing were not too eventful. On Tuesday we presented our projects, which I think went fairly well. My group couldn't get the projection system to work, so we eventually just showed our powerpoint to the professors directly from my partner's laptop screen.

Wednesday was our final exam. For some reason, it seemed to include a lot more calculus than reasonable (which I suppose was good because I'm better at that than differential equations). Five or so pages of what seemed like mostly integration by parts and Taylor expansions later, I was feeling relieved, if not slightly worried about my grade. Oh well, as we all told ourselves leading up to the final, we were the guinea pigs of the program so hopefully they will go easy on us.

After our exam, we had the last of the series of talks by our professors describing their research, and it was by far the most interesting of the talks. Apparently differential equations are actually useful in real life, and so we saw how they are applicable in cell biology, viscoelasticity, and other things as well. It was also the first time that I had heard anyone use a passage from the Bible to explain viscoelasticity.

On Thursday we went to Tian'anmen Square and the Forbidden City. A group of seven or so of us left campus at 4:00 am to get there in time for the flag raising at 5:00. That was cool to see, despite not having a very good view (one of the few times on this trip where being short was not a good thing). One of the local students said that for Chinese National day people camp out the night before to get good spots for the ceremony (sort of like Chinese Paternoville.....Maoville?)

We spent the rest of the morning in the Forbidden City. I won't say too much about it, but it was definitely worth the visit. We had a tour guide, so, while I did appreciate getting to learn a bit more about the place than the average tourist, I would have enjoyed having time to wander around and absorb things at a more leisurely rate. I think that if I could pick any place and time in history to be a fly on the wall, it would be the Forbidden City during its prime. I don't think I would enjoy living in that time period, but I think it would be really interesting to observe.

After a hotpot lunch, we spent the rest of the day shopping before finally returning to campus and crashing.

Our flight left at 4:00 on Friday, so after a suprisingly short morning of packing and a final lunch with all of the PSU folks, the four of us who were returning on the 18th left for the airport. We were originally all coming back together, but most of the others decided to stay longer to go to various places such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. I wish I had been able to stay longer, but one month was long enough to take off from my summer internship. As it is I will be two weeks short of the 12 weeks I am supposed to work for.

Our flight back to the US was not very bad (although it confirmed my belief that the meals that United serves are terrible). Yet again, however, our flight out of Chicago was cancelled (I think our airplane never showed up or something), so we got put up in a hotel for the night. I still got home by midafternoon Saturday, so I had some time to adjust before returning to work on Monday.

So for now, it's back to work for another month or so, and then school. There are a lot of things that I will miss about China (language, food, exchange rate, etc.), but definitely things that I will not miss (crazy traffic, pollution, the weather). I do know that I definitely want to go back someday, although not to Beijing. One downside of the trip was that I only got to see a very small subset of life in China (life on a college campus within a city). I am still very curious to see what the people and places are like in a more rural area. Maybe next time!

Birthday and Beihai

Well, it's been about a week since I last posted, and most of that week was fairly uneventful. Recently our class has been spending a lot of time on homeworks and projects, and we have our final project presentation (on Tuesday) and final exam (on Wednesday) rapidly approaching. In just 48 hours I will be done with the class! Remind me never to voluntarily take a differential equations class again....although I suppose it build character.

The week was fairly uninteresting, but this past weekend was awesome. After class on Friday I had a group meeting that was thankfully very short, so I got most of the afternoon to relax. Friday evening we left campus around 6:00 to go out for the evening. We first went to karaoke again, although a different place this time. It was much larger and had a better music selection, although yet again the music videos that went along with the songs were usually quite strange (I think that's the first time I have ever seen a pop song set to clips of wildlife).

After karaoke we went to a club near campus. Since the closest I have ever been to clubbing was probably high school prom, it was needless to say and interesting experience. It is definitely not a Chinese thing to do; most of the people we saw there were foreigners. It was fun though, and surprisingly most of the people in our group were not bad at dancing (who would have expected that from a bunch of math and engineering majors?). A few of the local students came as well, two girls who we see often outside of class and are getting to know fairly well, and also another guy who I think was from our class.

When we left the club we were all hot from dancing, so we hung out at a bubble tea place that we found next door. It took a long time to get the drinks we had ordered (I had green tea with aloe cubes, which sounds bizarre but was very good), so by the time we got them someone realized that, since it was past midnight, it was my birthday. After a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday which seemed to scare the waitresses quite a bit, we hung out for a while longer before heading back to campus.

The next morning we met at 6:00 am at one of the campus gates (which meant that I got about three hours of sleep that night) to go downtown to Beihai, which means North Sea. Beihai is right next to the Forbidden City, and has a lot of lakes, flowers, old buildings, and such. I think someone said that it was the old palace, and that the emperor used to hang out there a lot. It was a gorgeous day, and since we left so early we got to see a lot of the area before it got too hot. We also went boating on the lake, at which point I really wished that I had a sunbrella (Chinese people carry umbrellas almost all the time, whether to block rain or sunshine), since I got nicely sunburned from the sun reflecting off the water.

Around lunch time we left Beihai, and walked to lunch. By that point it was hot and we were all tired from the long morning and lack of sleep, so by the time we got to the restaurant we were all sort of dead. The restaurant, however, was extremely nice. It was Muslim, and I think over 250 years old. They had extremely good lamb, which I have never had until this trip.

After lunch, most of us headed back to campus since we were so tired. I got to take a nice long nap in between getting back and dinner. After dinner, I came back to my room with two classmates to try to get some work done on one of our projects. We worked for half an hour or so and got nowhere, so when two other classmates came in and told us that everyone was studying for the final in another room on our floor, we gladly went with them. I got my notebook and stuff together, and went over. When I got there, I walked into the room to find, not the usual huddled masses of people trying to figure stuff out, but a dark room, a birthday cake, and everyone singing Happy Birthday (for the second time that day). I was extremely surprised (I had no idea they were planning anything), and also very happy not to be studying on my birthday.

After taking pictures of all of us with the cake, we cut the cake and then Wei, who was helping me cut it, smeared a little icing on my face (we were using very flimsy plastic utensils, so we were both sort of messy. I, or course, had to return the favor. Normally at home that's where it would have ended, but apparently Chinese (at least Wei's family) go a little bit crazier. Things escalated into a full scale icing battle all the way down our hallway on the fifth floor. Three of the the girls hid in the downstairs laundry room, so after one of the more "trustworthy" members of the group coaxed them out we covered them in icing as well, making the fourth floor a mess too.

We finally cleaned everything up (which took a fair amount of time as well as several rolls of toilet paper), ate the remains of the cake, and then all wandered off to our own rooms to relax for the rest of the evening.

On Sunday we mostly did schoolwork (although I did wake up Sunday morning to a beautiful bouquet of lilies from the professor who knew it was my birthday). Sadly, it's getting close enough to the final that we probably won't be doing anything too interesting in the next few days.

Wow, long post. Oh well! I probably won't update again until after the final.

Oh yea, last Thursday we finally went out for Peking Duck. I won't write too much about it right now since this is already too long, but it was very good. I never knew this but you usually eat it in a thin pancake with sauce, scallions, and cucumbers. Very tasty!

Wanderings

Last night most everyone was either tired or already out, so I decided to go exploring. I walked north of campus for about half an hour without encountering much other than bus stops and a few fruit vendors, so I retraced my steps and then went east. There were a bunch of small shops, which I got to leisurely explore. One of the things I have noticed is that the minute a salesperson notices that you might be slightly interested in a product, they come over and try to sell it to you. While that might be nice if you have questions about what you're looking at, it makes window shopping extremely difficult. I always felt slightly bad when, after being asked some question in Chinese along the lines of "Do you like it?" or "Look how nice it is! Do you want to buy it?", I inevitably had to tell them I was just looking.

Since I was by myself, I definitely noticed that people stared a lot more. Normally when we are out in a group I blend in a little bit better (people usually just notice Desmond, who is from Kenya and about 6'4"), but since I was by myself I stuck out more.

Oh well, the cultural acceptance of staring goes both ways... at least I can stare at whomever I want :)

This afternoon several of us stayed on campus to do homework. Today was the first day since we got here that you could actually see the sun, so we went to the lake to enjoy the blue sky and try to get some work done.

Lake with water tower in the background -->

Apparently not many people do schoolwork at the lake, because we kept having people come stand beside where we were sitting, peering over our shoulders to see what we were doing. There were also several groups of school children wandering around, and one group stopped to talk and take pictures with us.

<--Some of the kids clustered around Matt and Ryan

It's always fun to interact with children here, because they have a very honest, open curiosity. Even if they are shy, they often want to take your picture, speak a little English with you, or even just wave hello. That connection extends to parents; if I smile at a particularly cute child, their mother or father will almost always notice and smile back at me. One of these days I should pull a Rachel and happily squeal "Baby!" and see what happens.

School Stuff and Chinese Karaoke

Friday, July 4th

Ah yes, celebrating our nation's independence while in another country. I've done that before (Germany, 4 years ago)! This time, however, was a little more exciting (when I was in Germany I only remembered that it was July 4th about three quarters of the way through the day).

In the morning, we had our usual class, which was a fair bit more boring than usual. We were all slightly restless, as well, probably because it was the end of the first full week of classes (they told us at the beginning that we would only have class four days a week, but apparently if we did that there's no way we would finish anything close to all of the material).

After class and lunch, I met with my local group. Our group consist of me, Xioalin, who just finished her third year in computational mathematics, and Jia, upcoming senior as well; I think he is some sort of math major but can't remember what exactly. We were assigned a project to work on with this group, in addition to a project and group assigned when we were still at Penn State (I'll get to that later).

The group meeting was sort of weird. I'm used to being able to at least contribute a little when working in groups, but at that meeting I wasn't really able to. My group members know a lot more about the subject than I do, so I just sort of sat there while they argued (in Chinese) about which approximation schemes we should use for the first section of our project. At least the equations they wrote were in math language that I could sort of understand. To be fair, they did try to include me in the discussion, but I think they could tell that I really had no clue what they were talking about.

After that meeting, we had our PSU group meeting, which we brought our local group members to as well. That meeting was conducted mostly in Chinese as well (I was the only non-fluent Chinese speaker). Our PSU group came out of that meeting confused as well, because the professor helping us basically told us to stop working on the local project and focus on the first project instead. This made us all sort of upset, because one of the main goals of the class is to work together with the local students and exchange knowledge and ways of thinking, which we would have done by working together on the project. We are going to meet tomorrow with the head professor to discuss this, so hopefully we can reach some sort of compromise.

Blegh, enough about meetings.

After dinner, we (about half of the PSU group and four local students) went out to a karaoke place. I was expecting it to be sort of like a large public lounge, similar to something you might find in the States (whatever that would look like; I've never gone to a karaoke place in the US either). Instead, we got a private room with couches, a couple of tables, and cool lights (including a disco ball which we never figured out how to turn on).

Karaoke is way more fun that you would think (yes, even more fun than K-House Khristmas Karaoke (hey, that's a cool name! maybe we should call it that next year if we do it again)). We got to do a fair number of English songs, as well as Chinese songs, and everyone (including those who swore they wouldn't) sang at one point or another. I got to sing the two Chinese songs I know, as well as some American pop classics (I had never realized how hard Wannabe, by the Spice Girls, actually is to sing). They also gave us a tambourine and some other percussion instruments, so you could still join in even if you weren't one of the two or more people singing (the picture is Nathan and Desmond rocking out on said percussion instruments).

Overall, karaoke was super fun, and if you ever get a chance you should do it (yes, you...I mean it!). I think we might go again, since not everyone got to go (maybe next Saturday for my birthday!).

When we left the place, it was raining and wonderfully cool after a hot day, and given that I was already hyper and in a singing mood, I skipped most of the way home singing loudly. Chinese people stare even more than Americans when you do that.

Numbers and Chinese

Today in class we started the numerical portion of the course (the full title of which is Analytical and Numerical Methods of Differential Equations). One of the things that I have always liked about math (at least as long as you don't learn anything too complicated) is that you can get an answer which is either right or wrong. There is something extremely satisfying about getting to the end of a problem, whipping out a calculator, and getting the correct number as an answer. So, when I knew what I got myself into with this class, I thought that the analytical portion would be something to suffer through and the numerical portion something to enjoy.

You learn something new everyday, and today I learned that I was wrong about that. Maybe part of it has to do with the difference in teachers, but I liked the endless equation manipulation so much more. Oh well, there's not much that I can do about it, I have to learn the material. Hopefully we will be doing a lot of MATLAB work; I am fairly comfortable with the programming aspect even if I am not with the actual math.

Alright, enough of math.

One of the things I have been trying to do since coming here is use Chinese as much as possible with strangers. It has ranged all the way from successful (negotiating for change with which to do laundry) to not-so-successful (getting to the front of a line at dinner and have my prepared sentence come out in a weird jumble of non-Chinese and English). It has actually been a lot easier than I expected to find people to speak Chinese with (I was under the impression that everyone would want to speak English to me in order to practice). It can be hard though; I think people often assume that my vocabulary is bigger than it really is, so even if I say a correct sentence I can't understand the answer.

Yesterday I had a better chance to use my Chinese in a little better of a setting. After going to office hours, Matt (the other person in our group doing the Chinese minor who is not a native speaker) and I went to dinner, and decided to sit with someone random and try to hold conversations with them. We picked a girl sitting by herself (Matt pointed out that it was easier for him to understand girls from having more female Chinese teachers, something that I had never really thought of before), and after a little bit of a false start got her permission to join her.

We picked the right person to practice with, since she was friendly and a Chinese major (I often wonder if Chinese math and science student have the same apathy towards their native language that I see all to often in the engineering department). Our conversation with her was not very smooth, because of the limited vocabulary issue, but it was great to have a relaxed conversation with someone who couldn't speak very much English (when speaking with Chinese people in our group I definitely notice that when the conversation gets a little rough I tend to switch back to English).

Right now I am going to meet a friend from my spring semester Chinese class, who is here studying Chinese for 6 weeks. Not only are we here at the same time, but we are also staying in the same group of buildings, so I will probably get to see her more than just today.

Not sure what's on the schedule as far as adventures for the next couple of days. The rest of the week I will probably spend most of my time on course work, but I'm sure this weekend we will be doing more exciting stuff (still on the list: Peking duck and karaoke)

Saturday, June 28^th.

Since our flight was delayed and we missed the first day of class, we had class on Saturday to make up for it. Afterwards, our professors took us all (about 40 of us) out to a restaurant for lunch. It was the first time since getting here that we had a round-table style meal. Basically, you sit at a table with 10 or so other people, and in the center of the table there is a rotating platform where all the food is. You take whatever you want as it turns around, so you get to try a little of everything. There were some interesting dishes (although nothing too bizarre). The coolest one was a rack of pork ribs shaped like the bridge that goes over the lake on campus, complete with a huge carrot carved to look like the nearby water tower.

After lunch, two of the local students took Desmond, Nathan, and I to visit Tsinghua University. Tsinghua is sort of the MIT of China, and it and PKU are considered the best two universities in the country. It was cool to see another university campus, and it was definitely different from ours. There were several lakes that were coated in lily pads, which had raindrops all over them. I also managed to find their aerospace department (which I don't think PKU has).

I also managed to get a phone that works locally, so I can communicate with my classmates. I suppose it's an indicator of how much I rely on having a cell phone, but it has been useful so far (especially today when I got lost on my way to office hours, and every one of the five different people I asked for directions told me to go a different way)

Catching Up - The Great Wall of China

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, our building has not had internet for the past two days. It's back now, so, after satisfying my Facebook cravings, I give you more updates!

Friday, June 27th

On Friday, we left campus at eight in the morning on a bus to go to the Great Wall. The spot where we went was about an hour and a half drive from Beijing, called Badaling (I think it's the most common place to visit the Wall). About halfway through the drive we started seeing mountains. Mountains here remind me a little of those that I saw around the Rhein River in Germany. They are close together, covered in trees, and very steep (although not that tall). The weather started off decently while we were still in the city, but as we got out into the mountains it started getting extremely foggy. The mist made the hills extremely beautiful, but visibility was not very good.

When we got on to the wall, visibility was even worse. The guard towers are not very far apart, but you could not see from one to the next. Even though you couldn't see more than the little section of wall in front of and behind you, it was still really cool to get to climb. I think that the visibility issues gave me a small picture perspective on the wall, rather than big picture. I definitely noticed more the extremities of the slopes, because that was all I could see.

I have heard that the Great Wall could have either ten foot soldiers or five people on horseback abreast at any point, but having been there makes me wonder about ancient Chinese. Did they ever actually march their soldiers along the wall like that? If so, they must have been almost superhuman. There were parts of the wall where we were clinging to the hand rail in order not to slide down the slippery steps. And we were at one of the easier sections of the wall to climb! Although, based on the number of girls we saw climbing in high heels, maybe Chinese people are just tougher than we Americans are. I also don't know how a horse could manage some of the wall sections. Maybe Chinese calvary horses back in the day were a little closer to mountain ponies or goats.

I definitely want to go back to the Great Wall at some point in my life, preferably when it's sunny. What little scenery we could see was gorgeous. There's something indefinably mysterious about the mountains in China. There were crenelations in the wall (I think that's the word I'm looking for) that you could stick your head through, and when you did, all sound from the other people atop the wall was gone. All you could hear was birds and animals from the trees. It was such a peaceful sensation, especially because there were so many people on the wall.