On Campus in Beijing Posted May 25, 2004 at 12:00 am

There were a lot of strange faces at breakfast this morning�and I don’t mean Chinese faces. We discovered that students from another mission, Anthropology & Archeology, were also staying at the hotel.

We were about thirty minutes late leaving the hotel due to waiting for people to get out of bed. We ended up leaving some 13 to 15 people behind at the hotel, either due to sickness or apathy.

We had individual group meetings on the bus as we rode to Tsinghua University. I found that the smaller meeting worked much better than the typical large group meeting.

At Tsinghua University, I saw more bicycles in one place than I’ve ever seen anywhere else. Practically every student was riding around on a bike, and there were a lot of students.

We were given a lecture on the research of Tsinghua’s State Key Lab of Intelligent Technology and Systems and shown a bunch of videos. They’re doing some interesting research. To me, the most interesting topics were OCR Chinese character recognition and a self-driving van.

After the lecture, we broke up into smaller groups for discussion with some Tsinghua University students. They gave us some coffee mugs as gifts as we departed for lunch.

After lunch we went to the China Academy of Science to survey the process engineering research facility. The facility was very cramped and poorly suited for a large group tour. I don’t know much about process engineering so that didn’t help either. Our group faculty member Chrisma explained that the facility was a full-scale, working test unit (of something). They operate the unit and take measurements from various points in the cycle and analyze the effects of various emission reduction techniques. That sounds like a good thing.

In between the China Academy of Science and dinner, we stopped at the Friendship Store of Beijing, located near the U.S. embassy. At three stories, it is the largest Friendship Store we’ve visited—probably the largest in all of China, since it’s Beijing. There was also a Baskin-Robbins and Starbucks nearby. I shopped for a while, but I didn’t find anything I couldn’t live without. I stocked up on Oreos and Ritz crackers at the grocery store and picked out a pack of postcards—postcards are sold in bulk in China—to send to friends and family.

We left the Friendship Store and made for dinner at the Xihua (?) restaurant. It was Sean’s birthday so we had a special to-do for him; he got a princess headdress out of the deal.

The highlight of the evening was the Beijing aerobatics show. It was a triumph of fantastic aerobatics and contortionism in much the same spirit as Cirque de Soleil. It was very entertaining. I understand that we saw the aerobatics show instead of the Peking Opera. I think it worked out for the better.