A Few Days in the Life

The last few days have been a blur of everything Chinese. Thursday morning we had our second Chinese class. We learned phrases enough to have a slight conversation with vendors or other people, our butchered pronunciation aside. Some of them have definitely come in handy, especially with the cab drivers who speak little to no English. We learned how to say "panda" as well, so we could talk about pandas if we wanted to.

Thursday afternoon we took a field trip to the Environmental Farm at Daxing. It's the oldest and biggest environmental farm in China, and it's quite impressive. There are a number of families who live there permanently and more workers who come in for the day. We took a tour of the energy plant, which consists of a room filled with chicken scat which is heated til it produces methane, which is then collected to use on the farm, and the heat energy produced is recycled to produce more methane. Very smelly, but very interesting. The farm uses methane stoves that are specially adapted for some purpose, although I didn't quite understand WHAT purpose. The farm produces 5 TONS - 10,000 lbs. - of fresh eggs every day, which are taken to market and arrive there less than an hour later - a feat considering the traffic on the way to the farm. We asked how many chickens it takes to produce 5 tons of eggs, and were informed that the farm houses 20,000 chickens. I can't imagine housing and feeding that many, let alone the smell around the coop. We got to see some of the animals the farm owns, like ducks, peacocks, horses, and ostriches, and were shown around the produce farm to see greenhouses upon greenhouses full of organic tomatoes, carrots, radishes, etc. The whole compound was amazing, and really important people like Kofi Anaan have visited that particular farm for the purpose of promoting awareness about the concept of environmental farms. Later that night, Vivian took us to her favorite bar on a strip in the city, where we had dinner and hung out most of the night.

Friday was mostly a class day. In the morning, we had a tour of the Department of Precision Instrument and Mechanology at the university. Under the umbrella of mechanical engineering, the lab houses most of the research done in mechE. We were able to see how certain machines worked and what they accomplished, as well as the work of some of the students, including one student who was working on a robot that plays soccer in competitions among the universities in China. It was cool as an engineering student to see the work that students at other schools are doing, and how they contribute to the work world, as well as how my school fits into that spectrum. It was also interesting thinking that the students that are here now are the ones I'll be working with in the future, whether onsite or via computer/telephone. It really drove home how import global awareness is, and what an opportunity it is to get to experience that so early in my career. Getting a head start on the competition is always a good thing. :) Our afternoon consisted of another lecture on the history of China followed by frisbee and dinner, and a wonderful night just chilling out around campus.

the Ostentatious and Unpleasant Wall of China

Today was our trip to the Great Wall!

The bad part was waking up in time to meet the girls for breakfast at 7 and the group at 730 but the best part was, we got to see the Wall! After a wonderful breakfast of french toast (Chinese style), we loaded up the bus and drove the roughly hour and a half to the Badaling Wall. Towards the end of the drive, we were going along gorgeous green mountain roads, and it was really foggy today so the fog was all through the mountains and it was just very pretty. At the Wall, we all chose the steeper path of the two directions to go, and began climbing. Alex and Josh decided to speedwalk the whole thing, so they took off with Laura while the rest of us took the time to appreciate everything around us. There was a HUGE Olympic logo on the one hillside, and everywhere else was just Wall, fog, mountains, and relatively few people because we were there by 9am. The part we were hiking was restored, but it was still ridiculous in its architecture. The steps were all uneven, a lot of sections should have had steps but instead were almost vertical slides, and there was about a two foot high hand rail, which was perfect for Jess but tricky for the rest of us to use. It was quite a calf walkout, trekking up what felt like hundreds of stairs and picking our way down steep ramps only to remember we had to walk back UP the ramps on the way back! There were vendors everywhere along the wall, which I didn't like. I felt like it almost cheapened the experience of actually walking along the Great Wall of China, but I still enjoyed the walk. Phil continued his trend of having more pictures of me than anyone else on the whole trip because Jess and I are "always in front of what I want to take a picture of!" It works out well, because I hate being in pictures and I never take them of myself, but now there will be pictures for everyone to see of me being in all these places! 

We saw a lot of white people at the Wall, which was a plus. There were groups from Purdue and Weber State (UT) there as well! It was kind of cool to hear unaccented English (unaccented to us, anyway) for the first time in a week from people that weren't part of our group. We got to see all kinds of cool buildings along the Wall, and one of my favorite parts was the Chinese graffiti that is on every brick, basically. On the one hand, it's kind of sad that the Wall is defaced like that, but on the other, it's awesome because it's all in Chinese so it just adds to the look of it. Vivian explained to us the use of some parts of the Wall, like the smoke watchtowers, just like in Mulan! Jess and I were quoting the movie nonstop today, and people kept looking at us like we were nuts, but you HAVE to understand that the Huns didn't just run at the Wall or something, please. They used grappling hooks, obviously. 

When we got to the end of the walkable part, our group hung out for awhile, taking ridiculous pictures of us jumping off the steps and waiting for the rest of the Pitt kids. One of the Chinese men with a fancy camera was taking pictures of us jumping too, and he showed us the pictures on his really fancy camera. We asked if we could take a picture with his son, who we found out was named Bruce (his American name) and is eight years old. He was probably the coolest kid ever, with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt and a Mickey Mouse hat. We made friends with our limited Chinese by saying hi and bye, while Rachel and Vivian asked his name and his age and other questions. His parents were so nice, letting us take pictures with him, and I think they were excited they had pictures of their son with a bunch of American girls! Heading back was much the same as before, with the ridiculous climbing. I was so glad I had my China shoes (which are NOT made out of porcelain, but were bought for the express purpose of visiting China), because they had great traction where I would've otherwise been falling flat on my face. There's no way you could climb that Wall if it was even the slightest bit slippy, and the Chinese guards must have been in incredible shape to walk it 24/7. The humidity of the fog completely killed Julia and I because of our asthma, and I had to whip out the inhaler for the first time all trip.

We headed back to meet up with the group to leave, and Julia and I decided to run down a really steep part to catch up with Brandon, Alex, etc. We started sprinting and almost caught up with them at the bottom of the hill and then....they disappeared!!! We looked aroudn but couldn't find them, so we we waited for everyone else at the bottom of the hill for about fifteen minutes til it was time to meet at the designated spot. We headed out the gates to where we were told to meet, and no one was there. So we waited, waited, waited. 1130, 1135, 1140. No one's showing up, so we started looking for them everywhere we could possibly go - no group. The funniest part was the two of us attempting to use a Chinese pay phone, when the English button only change the button saying "Menu" to English, nothing else! Vivian's cell didn't answer, Rachel's cell didn't answer, and we didn't know if we were dialing the right combination of numbers or anything. Julia and I decided we would have to write letters to our parents telling them we were lost in China somewhere at the Great Wall, but there's 10,000 km of Wall so we had no idea where! We looked around some more, and finally decided to wait for them to find us. 1155 we see Prof. Gao walking towards looking at us like he couldn't believe us. We were found!! It was definitely one of the highlights of my trip. How many people can say they were at the Great Wall, let alone LOST at the Great Wall?

We stopped at a noodle bar restaurant on the way back, where Vivian and I accidentally switched dishes, so I had green tea noodles with ginseng and chicken. They were so good, except for the fact that I kept getting soup all over my face, but everyone was having trouble so I didn't feel as bad. When we got back to campus we had  a lecture on Chinese economics by a professor from Tsinghua. I didn't understand most of it, not being a business major, so most of the graphs just meant a bunch of nice colors, but it was a nice break for the business kids from all the technical stuff we've been doing. After lecture we just hung around campus for the rest of the night, walking around and seeing different places, and Vivian taught us how to say panda in Chinese. Tomorrow we have another Chinese lesson and a visit to the farm, so it should be interesting!

PS_the title of this post is a reference to a passage in one of my favorite books, and is intended for irony. The Wall is actually amazing. :)

It's all Chinese to Me

Ni hao! 

Monday morning we had our first Chinese lesson with a graduate student from the University. She focused on basic characters and sayings, such as hello, goodbye, thank you, excuse me, too expensive, I don't understand, and others. I love you, but I doubt I'll be using that one any time soon. We learned to combine characters to make different words as well; China is symbolized by the characters for "center" and "nation", while I found it ironic that the United States is represented by "pretty" and "nation."

After lunch, we went to visit SMC, the company I did my pre-trip presentation on. The company deals with pneumatic valves and other such concepts. The show room was interesting because I'd seen a number of the parts before from Papa working for Portacel. There were machines making noise and moving everywhere, and the showroom was roughly the same. It was pretty cool, but I know I don't want to work in a plant making pneumatic parts.

For dinner we went to one of Vivian's favorite restaurants on campus, which is supposed to be a representation of American dining. It was very weird having a fork and knife and not chopsticks, and the American bread was by far the best part of my trip. Brandon ordered it jsut to see what it was, and they delivered him the hardest, driest square of toast I've ever seen in my life.  In between tears of laughter and bites, Brandon serenaded us with "America the Beautiful," until we had to explain to Vivian why we were laughing so hard. We had a get together with students from Tsinghua following dinner at a café of sorts. It was interesting to talk to the students about their majors, where they live, and a lot of other stuff. One of the girls we talked to was from the Sechuan (sp?) province, whose native inhabitants are considered an ethnic minority. She was a business administration major, and said it takes her 26 hours on a train to get home to visit, so she doesn't go home often. It's a lot harder for students to get plane tickets home here than it is in the States, so she only sees her parents at winter and summer breaks. I go home roughly once a month, and I can't imagine spending 26 hours on a train! One of the students played a traditional Chinese instrument for us, which resembled a harp. The music was beautiful, and all the Chinese girls got very excited when she started playing. We also ran into a Mormon missionary from Salt Lake City who's been studying at the University, and he was able to tell about some interesting places to see while we're here.

Tuesday morning we began with a lecture on Chinese Social Culture and History. The professor who taught us has taught Chinese and American history here in China and also taught Chinese history in the States. She was able to give us a nut-shelled background of China (a detailed background would take forever because there's thousands of years of civilization here), and an overview of the impact of the different dynasties. We had lunch at the American pizza place on campus, which was very good. I don't like tomato sauce, and this pizza was like Cici's in that it had minimal to no sauce on it; excellent. We had our third company visit in the afternoon where we visited Capital Bio, a biotech and research company. Capital Bio makes equipment for medical testing and treatments, such as DNA slides and examination devices. On our tour of the facility, we learned that the buildings on the grounds are all shaped like some object connected with biology. The front reception desk was a large carved dinosaur egg, the main building was a lung, I believe, another building was shaped like the heart, etc. Talk about challenging architecture! 

When we got back to campus, we ate dinner and crashed for a few hours before meeting to go shopping at Wangfu Jing Street, the really nice market place. It was much more exciting at night, with all the neon lights and people and everything. We had to wait at the meeting spot for almost an hour for Vivian and Rachel because they had to stop somewhere along the way (we all took taxis in small groups), but we got to make friends with one of the street vendors. She wouldn't leave us alone, so eventually we just started making conversation with her while continuing to turn down her offers of fake Rolexes and cheap Olympic merchandise. She tried to sell Josh's Mao watch to Phil, but Phil eventually bought one of his own, because who can turn down a waving Mao watch? We nicknamed her Lucy because we couldn't pronounce her Chinese name, and got a group picture with her. :)  When Rachel and Vivian finally arrived, we split up with pieces of paper with the address of our dorm written in Chinese for the taxi drivers. This time I went around with Josh, Phil, Rob, and Jess, who "needed some estrogen, and someone with TASTE." We wandered around fulfilling our gift duties and sampling tea at the teahouse before we met up with the rest of the group in this market alley where there are a lot of meat vendors and other souvenirs. Walking past the meat vendors was tough because it reeked, and everything there was skewered and raw, so the only that had been changed from when it was alive was no heads and skinned. You could still see all the legs and stuff though, so it made everyone walk really quickly. They also offered friend seahorse and scorpion for only a few yen! Jess, Julia, and the boys managed to pit the shoptenders against each other in a bod for chopstick sets, and finally pulled of a  decrease from 180 yen to 30 yen for decorative five-sets. That's about four dollars for really fancy chopstick sets, down from roughly 26!! The benefits of bargaining. The shoptenders grabbing me and the smell of the meat and all of the people shoving around started getting to me really quickly, so Julia and I left to wait outside the alley pretty fast. After everyone finished their shopping, we split in taxi-sizable groups again and caught rides home. It took roughly half an hour for Kayla, Kristy, Katie, and I to catch a cab, which was absolutely absurd. On the plus side, I got a good amount of my shopping done!

Raindrops are falling on my head

Sunday we had a walking tour of campus in the morning, but it was pouring down rain the whole time and freezing cold compared to Saturday's 80˚. We walked all around campus with Claudia explaining different places and parts of history to us, and finished by taking a break in a vacant classroom and having a discussion with Claudia and Rachel about cultural and political differences, as well as anything else anyone brought up. It was very interesting to hear the viewpoint of an actual citizen of China, and compare her views of America with our views of China. We discussed topics like university in both countries, politics, the view of Chinese students of Americans, the economy, how events like the Russian power switch and the chairman's visit to Japan will affect the political situations in China, and many others. It was really interesting to hear citizens' opinions of these things, since the media always portrays China as a very tightly controlled country where no one's allowed to speak their mind, but we asked Claudia about it, and she said "Well, I just DID say a lot of negative things about the government, so...."

After lunch it was still raining, so we couldn't go to the Wall. Instead, Rachel, Vivian, and Connie took most of the group shopping at a smaller, ethnic market, but Alex and I'd had enough of the haggling for a few days, and Alex B had had to miss the trip the day before, so the three of us went back to Tiananmen and the Forbidden City. It was chilly and grey, so there was nowhere near as many people as Saturday; in fact, it was downright empty, so we other than the occasional groups of businessmen, once we figured out where and how to order tickets (a feat which took about half an hour to accomplish without any Chinese-speaking people with us), we basically had a personal tour of the city as Alex and I pulled what we could remember from the day before. Alex B's camera was pickpocketed unfortunately, so we got a taste of the bad part of Beijing, but other than that it was an excellent trip and we felt pretty satisfied getting ourselves around Beijing with no one to help us. After dinner I was still so cold and damp that I curled up in sweats and watched a movie on my computer til I fell asleep. :)

If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao...

My bad; we weren't supposed to go to the Wall Saturday, instead it was Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City tour day!

First we drove to the center of Beijing to the Square. It's absolutely CRAZY how large that place is! I can't even imagine the number of people it would take to fill it, and imaging it full of tanks and soldiers and rioters was terrifying. It was really peaceful when we were there though. just lots and lots of tour groups. Claudia, our tour guide, told us that in the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall, Mao's body is preserved and people line up forever just to pass by Mao's body. Kind of creepy, but pretty cool as well. There was an Olympic countdown clock, just like everywhere else, but everything else was amazing. The portrait of Mao was huge. You could see it all the way across the square, and seeing it in relation to people walking on the balcony was phenomenal, because you can't realize how large the picture is until you get some perspective. Katie and I kept humming parts of "Revolution" by the Beatles because it talks about Chairman Mao. It's amazing how Mao was in reality a detriment to the country in as many ways as he was a benefit, but the Chinese worship him. He's on every piece of paper currency but two denominations, and everything everywhere is about him. Amazing.

We toured the Forbidden City after the Square. The buildings just keep going and going and going! It's ridiculous how many buildings there are, and what they were used for. There are three halls that were used just for preparation of the Emperor for ceremonies. He got dressed in the first one, walked twenty yards to the next one to rest after getting ready, and walked twenty yards to the last one for the actual ceremony. If you get tired walking 60 feet, I think they should've added a royal gym to the complex. The workmanship was worth all those buildings, though. The whole city is under restoration right now, so some of the buildings are newly repainted and very vibrant. Even the ones that aren't are spectacular, though. The one bad thing about the restoration, according to Claudia, was the Manchurian writing along the molding. Since only about 100 people in the entirety of Chia speak Manchurian anymore, the workers didn't know any of the language and just didn't redo it, so the Manchurian is lost. Some of the traditions about the city are so strange; there's a big red box in one hallway and a row of knobs on a certain door that are supposed to be good luck if you touch them. People were pushing everyone to get to these things, and taking pictures of their hands touching them. It was very bizarre, especially because we couldn't find any information about either object. As we were walking out of the back gate, one of the many many vendors came up to Alex and tried to get him to buy a Rolex. Being the master haggler that he is, Alex managed to get him from 180 yen down to 30 yen for the watch, but still walked away without buying the watch!

After our tour, Connie and Vivian, our Chinese guides throughout the trip, took us to a restaurant and shopping center. We had the traditional meal with the lazy susan again with even different food than we've previously had. The strangest thing was rice noodles, which the kids made me try first. Even though Alex made fun of me for having trouble with the chopsticks, the noodles turned out to be good, despite having a weird slimy texture, sort of like jello but nowhere near as sweet. Vivian told us the tea this time was jasmine tea, which is why it smelled so good. Then it was time for shopping! Katie, Christy, Kayla, Jenna, and I wandered around this huge outdoor shopping center (sort of like Pearl St in Boulder, CO) for a few hour, finding gifts for people and just looking around. Kara was right though, the constant haggling and the aggressive salespeople get REALLY old really quickly. I got some fun stuff though, and we saw a mall that was 8 stories of stores! The stores were a lot of high-class American stores in the mall, but outside of that it was more like what you'd expect to see at a Chinese market. When we met up with everyone later, we found that Alex and Josh were completely Mao-ed out...shirts, hats, and waving Mao watches. Amazing. When we came back to campus, we all napped for a little while and then just hung out on campus and at one of the local bars.

I'll finish my updating later, time for the next company visit!

Mishap

The last one I posted didn't come through, and it's going to take forever to retype, so I'll update asap! Sorry about that.

Oh, and PS_we're alive, no one died in the earthquake. We were on a bus when it hit, so we didn't even get to feel it. Cheers :)

And so it begins...

I'm in CHINA!!!

The flight here was amazing. Long, definitely. 14 hours - I'm not looking forward to repeating that one on the way back. But it was fantastic because we flew directly over the North Pole. I'm pretty sure not many people get to see the northern most parts of Canada, the polar cap, Siberia, Russia, and the Great Wall in their lifetimes. After Josh's "girlfriend" and the strange girl between us switched seats, we amused ourselves by taking pictures out the window of the cool stuff we were seeing and watching Step Up 2 on our little tv's. The sun traveled with us the whole time, so it was always 2 pm, which was good because we weren't tired when we landed even though it was roughly 2:30 am normal time. Because of checking into customs, traveling to Tsinghua University, waiting for an hour outside the dorm, a welcome dinner provided by our hosts at the University, and exploring basically the ENTIRETY of this enormous place by ourselves for about two hours, I didn't get to bed until 11 pm local time. 29 straight hours of being awake! Yuckkk.

The rooms are a lot different. The other Plus3 trips are staying in hotels, with about 4 people to a room. We each have our own room in a two person suite. Some people, like me, have suitemates that are random international students at the University. There's no one else from Plus3 on my floor even! My suitemate's name is Alice, and she's from Seoul. I told her English was very good but she disagreed, but even so we get along very well. The suites have two teeny rooms with a desk, a tv (I found CCTV in English!), the hardest bed you've ever felt, and a tiny armoire thing; a niche with room for a microwave or something else small; and a strange bathroom. The sink, showerhead, and toilet are all in the same room with the drain on the floor and a curtain between the shower/sink and the toilet. It's the wildest thing I've ever seen.

Beijing is totally geared up for the Olympics. Everywhere, there are electric countdown signs, logos, construction of facilities, cleaning up of the city. Almost every car has a sticker with the logo, and we were able on our driving tour of part of the city to see the hotels they're building (one's shaped like a torch with the wavering flame and everything!), the Bird's Nest - the stadium, and the Water Cube. You can tell the Chinese are putting so much work into making Beijing a good place for people from all over the world to visit. The city is so different from American cities, too. Everyone here rides bikes! We tried to count bikes in the first parking lot, but we realized pretty quick you'd be counting til forever. Rachel, our graduate student asst., also told us that cars, not people, have the right of way in traffic. The cars are so interesting to watch. There's hardly any SUVs, just buses and the occasional van. Every other car is a Jetta, Elantra, Golf, or some other tiny car that gets pretty good gas milage, because there's no room for big cars and gas is arond $5.34 a gallon for #93. Makes $3.59 sound okay, yeah? :)

Our welcome dinner was fantastic but bizarre. The way the Chinese eat formal meals is by placing a number of courses on a lazy susan and everyone just takes whatever they want off of the dishes. The food just kept coming and coming - even our professor couldn't believe they kept bringing out more courses! We had noodles and real Peking duck and beef stew and lo mein and breads and mushrooms and chicken and marshmallow-y things and so much more. Everyone here eats with chopsticks, so we're all getting pretty proficient at them, but it was tough the first meal. After dinner, a group of us went exploring around the University. We kept asking different people for directions - a challenge because it's tricky to find students or staff who speak enough English to both understand us and give us directions that WE understand - and I think we eventually got six different sets of directions to the same place, and none led us to the RIGHT place! But I'd say we got to see a large percentage of campus, and campus here is absolutely huge.

This morning, even though I'd hardly slept, I woke up at 5 am - it's hard to sleep when your body clock tells you it's 5 pm. Hot water doesn't run round the clock here, so I had to wait until 7 to shower, and we met for group breakfast at 8. Getting food at the dining halls is a true adventure here, especially drinks. The staff don't speak English at all, so mostly I just point at something and hope they get what I'm pointing to. I pointed to orange drink this morning at the drink station, but the lady misunderstood and gave me a funny grape juice bottle, which turned out to be a good mistake. After we exchanged currency (a two hour process) at the local bank, I went to the supermarket and bought another bottle of grape juice, and had more for lunch! I might have to bring some home with me. After lunch we had our first company visit to Beijing Hyundai. It was about an hour drive away for a roughly 45-minute tour of the plant. It was amazing to see the assembly lines and the cars being manufactured. The Chinese are masters of efficiency, and I was very surprised to see that almost every worker in the plant was under the age of 25 and male. Our guide told us the education level of the plant workers is just passing a 3 month training course, no degree needed, not even high school. The cars they make are of very high quality though, so I guess it works for them.

Now, seeing as I've gotten 6 hours of sleep in the last 51 hours, I'm just hanging out in my room, watching a movie on my computer, and playing on here and facebook now that I finally have internet again! Tomorrow we go to the Wall!!!! :)

Attn Ladies and Gentlemen

PS_My flight is real. They just announced that they made a mistake but we actually ARE going to Newark, it just hasn't shown up on the screens and we'll be about twenty minutes late. Mildly reassuring.

However. we are now an hour and ten minutes from when my flight was SUPPOSED to leave and I am still sitting at the airport. We're scheduled to begin boarding in ten minutes. I hope so, because I want to get on my way! 

Outtttttta heeeeeere

I have to say, I  love the Pittsburgh airport. My favorite is Detroit so far, but I do love the 'burgh. We have free wireless - how many airports can say that?

And so The Journey begins. Packing was crazyy. I've never had to pack within limits for two weeks. ND sure, but we were driving and I didn't need business casual clothing or good walking shoes or anything. Trying to fit two weeks' worth of clothing, shoes (I only brought four pairs!!), toiletries, etc. into ONE suitcase was nuts. (We're allowed two but what a hassle, plus the extra domestic charges now.) However, I managed 42 lbs.!! Perfect. 

I'm slightly nervous because I'm at my gate but it says Cleveland departing at 1:20, but I'm supposed to start boarding at 1:05 pm, plus my flight hasn't shown up on ANY of the monitors. Should be interesting. :) We'll see how that goes, and if it doesn't go right, I'll just see what I can accomplish towards getting a ride to NJ.

Ready, set, go!

NEW!!

Ta-dahhhhh! New blog to be filled with everything from my trip in less than a week to Beijing and hopefully much much more. I'm super excited for this trip, even though I'm nervous too. It'll be weird not being able to read signs or understand what people are saying; fortunately we learned how to say our names! Right now it's just packing, packing, and more packing. Don't forget the camera cord or the Pepto, remember to pack business casual as well as normal clothes, etc.etc. So much to remember! I'll be sure to update when I can! Our dorms at Tsinghua University will have internet connection, so it should be fairly often. 

There will be 22 students on the trip, roughly half engineering and half business, as well as a professor and graduate student. I don't know many of the students yet, but I can't wait to make new friends! It'll be interesting seeing Beijing through the viewpoint of the business students as well, seeing as I only tend to focus on the engineering aspects. 

The next few days should be craZAzy with packing, so I'll update when we're on our way!