30 June 2006

Yuanming Yuan and Living in Beijing pictures

My lovely dorm room. Don't be fooled by the appearance of the bed; it's actually rock hard. It's a wooden plank with a sheet and a comforter. The only thing I have slept on that is harder is the concrete floors in Alaskan churches. There is a decent sized TV in the lower left hand corner just out of sight. My bathroom (see below) is basically right behind my bed; the door is across from the sink in the entrance.

This is my bathroom. It's not as good as at NUS because the shower is pretty much part of the toilet and there is a sink and mirror in the shower, but it's still a private bathroom, so I am not complaining. We also have a real toilet, thankfully (see below).

We have real toilets in our dorms, but every other toilet in China looks like this. I took this picture at NUS, so imagine it dirtier and without the nice trash can and toilet paper. Fun.

The dark blue bike with the dark yellow lock is mine. I really like it, especially the bell. Cross your fingers that it doesn't break or get stolen any time soon!

This is our hotpot dinner. You can see how we're using our chopsticks to drop in the raw beef (and have plates of raw meat surrounding us). We used the same chopsticks to eat, so we dipped them in the boiling water to sanitize them. So good!

This is the ruins of the main palace at Yuanming Yuan. It used to be a grand palace, the main residence and entertaining hall. It took a lot of manpower to destroy it so completely!

One part of Yuanming Yuan that has been restored is the maze. We all found our way through the maze to the middle, but not without a wrong turn or two!

Average Beijing Week

On Monday evening, I finally ventured into Beijing to explore a little.  I hadn’t left the campus yet except to buy my bicycle, so it was time to do some exploration.  Tsinghua University is outside the main part of the city, so it takes some planning to get there.  Just about everyone went as a group on the subway system (with Molin as our guide) for dinner.  We split up once we got into the city center with some people eating at KFC, some eating street food (think roadside stalls), and the rest of us going to a hotpot restaurant.  Hotpot restaurants are a lot like fondue.  You order plates of raw meat (for us, lamb, chicken, and beef) and then drop them in the vat of boiling water flavored with onions, chives, and other seasonings.  After they’re cooked, you fish out the meat, dip it in the peanut sauce, and eat it.  Keep in mind that we’re using chopsticks the whole time, so not only are we trying not to splash hot water on ourselves but we’re also attempting to maneuver the food around with slippery plastic sticks.  It was difficult at first, especially fishing out the cooked meat, but we all got the hang of it in the end.  We had our own private room because we had 9 people (although, as we always end up with private rooms, I think they like separating out the Americans at some places).

The next evening we had dinner and dancing plans with our professor.  The whole class, including the Tsinghua and National University of Singapore students, went out to dinner at a restaurant on campus.  It was traditional style Chinese food complete with pig ear meat as an appetizer.  When we walked in, Professor Zhou told us not to sit with friends, to sit with new students.  I ended up at a table with three Tsinghua students, one NUS student, and two other Americans.  We talked about everything under the sun, everything from dating habits to the GRE (which they are all taking in the fall) to handgun laws in the United States.  

After dinner, when we were just sitting around, we decided to play a game.  I don’t know if you have heard of Big Booty in the USA, so here is a brief description:
One person is the ‘Big Booty,’ and everyone else is assigned a number in order.  Everyone claps in rhythm and chants, calling out other numbers when you number is called.  Big Booty always begins the game.  A typical game could be: ‘Big Booty, Number 1’ ‘Number 1 Number 2’ ‘Number 2 Number 5’ ‘Number 5 Big Booty’ and so on.
Because we are in China, we modified the game to be ‘Big Buddha.’  It was challenging playing with the Tsinghua and NUS students because it was their second language, so after a while we switched it up to make it challenging for the Americans.  We started playing in Chinese!  It was really difficult to start with because I didn’t know any of the numbers, but now I really know how to count to 7 in Chinese (because we had 7 people playing).

After dinner, we headed over to the dancing.  There was a courtyard with music playing that apparently hosts dancers every evening.  It was mostly older people doing ‘real’ dances such as the tango and waltz.  The music was incredibly varied.  I heard everything from waltz to traditional Chinese to a disco version of the Titanic song.  We all got out there and danced, pulling on our knowledge of the box step and swing dancing, and Scott even attracted a small crowd with his break dancing.  It was a fun way to spend the evening.

Tonight we went out for dinner again.  There is an Italian place called Tafi near the main gate of the university that has been highly recommended by past program participants, so we decided to test it tonight.  They were right; it was delicious.  We were celebrating our first exam being over.  Many of us wanted to have a fun night out, but everyone was so tired after studying like mad for two days straight that we could only handle dinner.  We are taking ISYE 3104: Introduction to Manufacturing and Warehousing right now, and it is intense.  It’s a quantitative class, meaning that it involves a lot of outside study to get your head wrapped around all of the concepts and formulas.  We spend so much time in class that it is hard to find the right balance between study and exploration (on a study abroad), but I think we’re doing OK now.

One more quick update: I am doing a lot better with food.  I found several food cafeterias on campus with much better food than the first one I found, and I have discovered several dishes that I really like at each place.  I also am getting better at ordering food in Chinese, so I am not as surprised any more.  We’re also exploring ‘real’ restaurants more now, so that helps as well.  It’s a little troublesome trying to find out if packaged foods have milk or not, but I am doing my best!

26 June 2006

First Impressions of Beijing

I have successfully arrived in Beijing, China.  I will be studying here at Tsinghua University (the top engineering school in China) until August 2nd.  All of China is in the same time zone as Singapore, so none of us have to deal with any jetlag.  We arrived on Friday evening after a day of traveling, and classes begin today.

Living in Beijing is like nothing else.  Everywhere we have been so far, while English may not have been the primary language, we have at least been able to get by without knowing the local language.  That’s not possible in China.  Everything is in Chinese, and pretty much no one (except the highly educated) speaks English.  The worst part is that everything is written in Chinese characters.  When you travel to a country like Germany or France, you may not understand the language, but it is close enough to English that you can usually figure it out.  You can’t do that with Chinese characters.  You either know them or you don’t; there is no guessing.  Also, when you learn French or German phrases (‘Is that chicken / pork / beef?  Where is the toilet?’), it is fairly easy to remember them as they use our same alphabet and sounds.  Learning Chinese phrases is very difficult.  First, they use different sounds than European-based languages.  Second, Chinese is a tonal language, a concept that we don’t have in English.  Each syllable can be pronounced with one of four tones: first (flat), second (up), third (up and down), and fourth (down).  A syllable can mean four different things with each of the tones.  For example, ‘ma’ under each of the four tones means mother, hemp, horse, and to abuse or scold respectively.  Also, when you add it to the end of a sentence, it turns the sentence into a question.  This is hard for us because we can’t hear the tones very easily or speak them correctly, leading to some real confusion!

The lack of language skills is an especial hindrance when we’re trying to eat.  Because the menus are in Chinese characters, we won’t know what is actually being served.  We have to ask for noodles and a meat and vegetables and hope that’s what we get.  It’s a little easier in a fast food chain where we have a good idea of what they serve, but it is harder in some of the student cafeterias where you can’t see what they serve.  You never quite know what you’re going to get.  Also, I am lactose intolerant, which means I have to find some way of asking for no milk or cheese.  Last night we ate at Qing Qing, a fake McDonalds, and I have learned how to ask for no white sauce on my chicken sandwiches, so I asked for it without white sauce.  However, then the lady asked me if I wanted the lettuce also (which I didn’t understand) and then tried to communicate the fact that she didn’t think she could give me a sandwich with no white sauce as they were pre-made (which I didn’t understand).  I could kind of figure this out from hand gestures, but I would have been lost without Carlanna (who spent last summer in Shanghai and has had two semesters of Chinese language).  She managed to convey that if I had the white sauce, it would make my stomach ‘not good’ and so the lady made a special sandwich.  So, even when you know what to ask for, the lack of language skills makes continuing the conversation very tricky.  Also, when I want to buy crackers or cereal or something from the store, the ingredients are all in Chinese characters, so I can never really tell if they include milk or not.  I know the character for milk, but there are so many things that I can’t have (condensed milk, buttermilk, milk powder, etc) that I can’t learn all of the combinations in five weeks.  Wish me luck!

Aside from the language, the next hardest thing for us to deal with is the environment.  Beijing must be the most polluted city on earth.  It is so polluted that is seems that the city is continually under a thick cloud of fog, except that oftentimes the fog is yellow.  And it’s smog.  You can’t see the sky during the day.  You get a few hours of relatively clear weather in the morning, but by mid-afternoon it’s getting heavier and by dinnertime you don’t want to be outside at all.  It has been raining every evening here, so the nights are a bit clearer, but it’s still really hard on our respiratory systems.  We are all having coughing fits.  Also, when you’re not breathing in smog, you’re breathing in dust.  China industrialized very quickly and left its environment behind.  Consequently, there are no trees to hold down the dust and sand in the desert, and it’s encroaching on Beijing rapidly.  Dust storms are worst in April, and I read somewhere that in the worst one dust reached Taiwan!  Whenever we come in from being out all day, we have to scrape the dust off of our skin.  It’s very, very dirty.

Tsinghua University is an incredibly large campus, so we all had to buy bicycles to get around.  Imagine all of us Americans, most of us who haven’t been on bikes in a long time, trying to bike around the streets of Beijing!  We have only been on the streets about twice now, and no one has been hit, but we’ve had a couple of close calls.  China drives on the right side of the road, like America, so that does make it a bit easier to ride around.  During the day, however, there are so many people on bikes around campus that they are the hardest to avoid.  We joked today (the first weekday we’ve been riding on campus) that it was like being in a really large, really unorganized bicycle race.  It’s a lot of fun, though.  We’re getting better at maneuvering through the crowds, so perhaps we’ll be professionals at the end of the summer.  I had forgotten how much fun it is to ride bikes.  Too bad there’re too many hills at Georgia Tech, not enough bike paths to get to classes, and no way could I ride a bike on the Atlanta streets.

Aside from class, tours around campus, and buying bikes, the only other thing we have done in Beijing is visit Yuanming Yuan, the Old Summer Palace.  It was built during the 12th century but destroyed by the British and French troops during the Second Opium War.  A lot of the treasures and pieces of the palace keep showing up even today in auction houses.

Next Friday we have a city tour planned, and we may head to the Great Wall on Saturday.  It’s all up in the air now!

23 June 2006

Last Day in Singapore

This may or may not be my last post for a long time.  I am leaving Singapore in 6 hours (9 until flight time) to fly to Beijing, and as we all know, blogging is a little against the rules in China.  I won’t know until I get there if this can be accessed at all, but I will work something out.

Flying to Singapore means that this study abroad is officially halfway over.  We took two classes here in Singapore and have two remaining at Tsinghua University in Beijing.  We have been in Singapore for about 5.5 weeks and have the same amount of time in Beijing.  We have done so much here in Singapore that I can honestly say I have seen and done everything that I wanted to during this leg of the trip, and as you have seen from my postings, it has been amazing.

We have had a lot of free time during this past week, which was amazing because it was our last week in Singapore.  We had our 3039 (Quality Control) final on Tuesday morning at 7.50am and went straight to the UPS Customs facility afterward for a talk about the logistics involved in controlling the flow of packages throughout Asia.  We had another field trip the next day to the Asia Pacific Brewery (which brews Tiger Beer and Heineken, among others) followed by lunch at the revolving restaurant overlooking the Port of Singapore.  After eating we had a brief talk about the logistics involved in running the port.

As those were our only classroom requirements, we also have had a lot of free time this week to enjoy Singapore.  Almost the entire GT crew hung out together on Tuesday evening after the exam and then went out to bars in Holland Village (an area of Singapore I hadn’t seen before).  Last night we all went out to Zouk, a sort of super-club that has three clubs in one.  We had a blast celebrating our last hurrah in Singapore.  Today Marianna, Kristen, and I went out to Banana Leaf Apolo (the Indian restaurant we like so much) one last time before heading over to Orchard Road to take advantage of the Great Singapore Sale for the last day.  It was a very chill, very relaxed, very perfect last day in Singapore.

18 June 2006

Cambodia Pictures: Phnom Bakheng and Airport

One of the giant hills we had to trek up to get to the temple. The next hill had steps, but they were steps like at Angkor Wat with a few more handholds.

It was worth the trek to get this view at the top, though.

The hardcore girls! We're so cute ... and so sorority-like. :)

Don't worry Mom - this isn't the complete edge of the temple. There's another level a few meters below this one as it is in a pyramid shape.

Man, those pillars are heavy to hold up! Good thing they have me!

And finally, the Siem Reap international airport. Looks just like Atlanta, right?

Cambodia Pictures: Ta Prohm

The entrance to Ta Prohm. We had to walk down a long dirt road to get to this point, and you can see through the gate that we have another long dirt road to walk down.

The main temple. You can see how the massive trees have overrun the temple and have become intertwined with the walls. They are now supporting the temple walls and cannot be removed.

Me and Marianna in front of a cool tower. Yeah.

This is the picture that the Asian lady jumped into to take a picture with the 'Power Rangers.'

So, for our next group photo, we were Power Rangers!

This is one of the trees you saw from the outside on the inside. You can see how the root system has grown into and around the walls and columns.

Now, just for some sense of size, here is a picture of us with some of these roots. They were incredibly massive! The trees were just enormous.

Cambodia Pictures: Banteay Srey

We ate lunch right before going to Banteay Srey. If you can see, Lane, Marianna, and myself have coconuts in front of us. One of the best meals to get at these roadside restaurants was some sort of curry served in young coconuts. So good!

The main entrance of Banteay Srey. I like how we make a good pyramid.


These are both good examples of the red sandstone used to build most of Banteay Srey. It is different than the gray used in the other temples, perhaps because it was built 200 years earlier.

Kristen and me being silly explorers.

I'm in Cambodia!

... and this was one of the smallest temples we visited!

The moat around this temple, unlike some of the others, was mostly filled in already.

Cambodia Pictures: Floating Village

These next two are houses that we passed on the way to catch the boat to go to the floating village. You can see how they are very flimsy and well-suited to being moved for the rainy season.



These next ones are all of the floating village. There are about 7000 people who live in this village, and if you see this lake from a plane, it is so large that you think it is an ocean - even in the dry season.
(How many US parents would let their kids row their own boats around at this young age with no supervision? When you live in a floating village, you have to know how to swim at an early age.)

(Even the schools float for this village. This school was donated by either the Vietnamese, the French, or the Japanese. The main rooms on are the first level, and the upper level is a basketball court. It is covered so that they can still use it in the rain.)

(Not only do the fisherman farm fish, but they also farm fresh-water alligators. These were the most active alligators I have ever seen, moving around, snapping their jaws, and going after one another.)

(This is a floating Catholic church. Bet you haven't seen one of those before!)

Cambodia Pictures: Angkor Wat

These are some of the little girls who were so insistent on selling their postcards and bracelets.

Angkor Wat. It is 10 times the size of the main temple at Angkor Thom. That's really big!

The outer edge of Angkor Wat is passageways like this. They're double layered, meaning that if you walked through the column to your left (shuffled sideways to your left), you'd be staring down another passageway just like this one. The only difference is that rather than having columns lining the left, the wall of the temple covered with carvings runs the length of the passageway.

These are the massive and trecherous stairs that we climbed to get to the center tower of the temple. If it looks like a vertical wall, that's because it nearly is; the angle is 70 degrees!

The climb was worth it to be able to see all over the temple and back across the water from the top.

This is just for a sense of scale: we're as high as we can go in the top of the tallest part of the center tower. This is a BIG temple!

Cambodia Pictures: Angkor Thom

The south gate to the temple city of Angkor Thom. Those are demons lining the road on the right; matching gods line the road on the left.

Aside from the cars, vans, bicycles, and motorbikes coming in and out of the gate, you would also see Cambodians riding elephants around.

After you went through the gate, you had to drive farther down a dirt road to get to the center temple.

This is the same center temple from the back. This is Team Hardcore: Those Who Trek Through the Jungles of Cambodia. Left to right: Bart Stout, Kevin Kitchens, me, Marianna Jewell, Carlanna Cunningham, Lane Clark, and Kristen Kerns. (We have many group pictures, so I won't name them anymore.)

This particular temple in Angkor Thom, Bayon, is famous for all of its eerie faces watching everyone.

The temples are really crumbling in places. Many of these bricks are also bricks from the outer walls that have been moved and labeled for restoration and then never replaced.

An example of the carvings on the wall. Imagine this for hundreds of meters down long walls and several meters high. It was crazy-intricate.

We found lots of windows and doorways to take pictures in.

The group in front of the lone smiling face in Bayon.

And finally, our guide, Milky!