Archive for the Travel Category
When traveling with a large group, a few people will invariably by late. I understand and accept this fact. We’ve spent as much as thirty minutes extra waiting for people at various points on the trip. At this point, we leave after waiting five minutes; I think it’s a good thing.
We devoted the morning to touring the famous, or infamous, Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, which is right across the street. Tiananmen is quite modern compared to the other tourist attractions; most of its features were built shortly after the revolution and founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Tiananmen has the mausoleum of Chairman Mao, a large portrait of the Chairman hanging over the red gate leading to the Forbidden City, and a large obelisk commemorating the founding of the PRC.
The Forbidden City is much older at about 600 years old. It has 9,999 rooms, supposedly making it have one less than the Palace of Heaven. I noted a careful use of odd numbers in the layout of the Forbidden City. For example, when you first enter there are five bridges across a stream and most of the stairways come in sets of three. Various guides informed us that odd numbers are traditionally good in Chinese culture and even numbers are bad, particularly 4 and 14. Other than that, there’s not a whole lot to the Forbidden City; just lots and lots of rooms for the emperor and his concubines. Jackie told us that the emperor stayed in a different room each night, and it would take 27 years to stay in them all.
It was difficult to fully enjoy Tiananmen and the Forbidden City due to the sheer volume of tourists you have to compete with for space. There’s also the matter of the peddlers, who will converge upon a group of Westerners like a swarm. It was worst outside the Forbidden City where a dozen or so peddlers were waiting as we got on and off the bus.
As the trip has worn on, some members of our group have grown disinclined to participate in some events, and this trend was evident at lunch, where six tables were left empty by those who chose to forfeit the meal and return to the hotel early. They didn’t miss anything fantastic, but we did celebrate DeLanna’s birthday, which made an otherwise generic meal notable.
We had a couple hours of free time after lunch before our farewell dinner and party. I declined the opportunity to do any more shopping as I’ve given up on finding a nice, ornate Chinese dagger. I spent my free time in my room relaxing and journaling instead.
D.J. inquired as to the meaning of agnosticism and why it was my current philosophy. Religion is certainly not my favorite or most comfortable topic of discussion, but I do think that people need to be able to have rational discussion about their beliefs; this might be wishful thinking on my part. I tried as best I could to be open-minded and considerate. D.J. explained the background behind why he followed Christianity, and he asked me some non-personal questions to illustrate his points. At the end of the conversation, I felt like I had neither gained nor lost ground, but that wasn’t the point, either.
The entire group convened in the lobby at 5 P.M. to depart for the farewell celebration. Before dinner, we had a final group meeting to discuss the last few lectures and discuss how we did or did not accomplish our goals for the trip.
I think I generally accomplished my goals for the trip. There are a couple areas where I felt I could have done better, but they are relatively minor. I made some friends, immersed myself in a foreign culture, and gained a broader perspective of my world because of it. More than that, I just had fun.
I did, however, want more pictures with cute girls and more pictures with people in general. I would also be more satisfied if I had taken more initiative as a leader and taken more risks to try to make more friends and contacts. I didn’t find the one great souvenir that I would have liked for myself. Lastly, I think I need to worry less about others’ opinions and perceptions of me; I feel like I’m holding myself back by worrying about these things.
The second International Mission on Engineering group was originally supposed to join us at some point in the evening, but their flight into Beijing was significantly delayed.
I expected the farewell dinner to be one of our best meals, as it was a special occasion, but I was disappointed terribly in this regard. The only memorable dishes were the creamy mystery soup, with a small egg of unknown origin and other unidentified components that may have been squid, and a shrimp dish featuring extremely large shrimp, complete with heads and tails, served in a special sauce. The shrimp wasn’t bad once all the unwanted components were removed (i.e., head, tail, skin, etc.). We did get free refills on our soft drinks for a change, so I guess it wasn’t all bad.
As the night wore on, it grew apparent that the whole farewell celebration was ill-conceived, at least from a timing standpoint. It created a late night right before an early departure from Beijing tomorrow morning.
We started the day off with a visit to the China Aeronautics University where we listened to a couple speakers before breaking up for guided tours. We were given a good lecture on some of the advances in aeronautics, including a primer on basic flight and the university’s unmanned aircraft research. The first thing they showed us was an in-house flight simulator; controls and gauges were shown across multiple monitors and the external view was projected onto a large screen. Some members of our group were allowed to try the simulator out. The second point of interest was the university’s aeronautics museum; the university has a yard of grounded aircraft, including a Harrier and cruise missiles. We had lunch on campus, but it was not in a dining hall. Lunch was served buffet-style; it was one of the stranger meals we’ve had, more because of the presentation and atmosphere than the food. The “corn-drop” soup (my name for it) made another disappointing appearance. This soup looks like egg-drop soup, but it contains corn and it has a sweet taste completely alien to good egg-drop soup; disappointing indeed.
After lunch we went directly—diregarding a short stop at the Friendship Store for some folks to change money—to the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace is huge, impressively extravagant, and completely mobbed by tourists (and peddlers). Like the Great Wall, there were many Chinese tourists and a few other Westerners. From what I understand, most of the Chinese tourists visiting the Beijing attractions are from outside of the Beijing municipality; it stands to reason, I suppose.
In the Summer Palace, we learned about the Dragon Lady, Cixi, and her infamous exploits; supposedly, she killed off several heirs to the throne and numerous other figures in her ambition to rule China. We saw the courtyard where Cixi placed one of the heirs under house arrest for years before having him killed shortly before her own death. We also saw an unlucky rock and a marble boat. We were originally scheduled to take a dragon boat ride across the large lake at the center of the grounds, but the ride was cancelled due to low water levels.
As we departed the Summer Palace, some people expressed an interest in returning to the hotel rather than going to the planned, and pre-paid, dinner. I stayed on for a dinner that proved to be pretty unsatisfying. The restaurant seemed to be making an attempt to cater to Western tastes by providing such cuisine as coarsely shredded iceberg lettuce; Italian, French, and other salad dressings; barbecue spare ribs; and a couple flavors of iced tea that were neither iced, nor refreshing. What was left of the group returned to the hotel for free time after the meal.
I met up with John and we walked to the nearby Hypermart to buy more tea. I bought chrysanthemum tea for Mom on recommendations from John and Robert. It was surprisingly cheap to buy these special kinds of tea; maybe they are more common than I surmised. I got about fifty grams for only 8 RMB ($0.97). We were also interested in finding a martial arts store with cool weapons, but conveying what we were looking for to our Chinese-speaking friends proved to be a task too great, as we never did get a good answer. The staff at the hotel suggested Curio City, located right next door, but Curio was closed by the time we got there.
We returned to the hotel for Cribbage in Dave’s room. I did not know how to play Cribbage, so Dave and John taught me by example. I watched one two-hand game before participating in a three-hand game. Unfortunately, beginner’s luck was not with me because I lost and got skunked, meaning I did not round the last corner before the winner passed 120 points. It was a lot of fun, regardless.
Cribbage does strike me as an interesting card game for a few reasons. First, Cribbage actually seems to have a strong two-person game so it’s that much easier to find enough people to play; most card games require four or more people for optimal play. Second, the game has an unusual scoring system based largely on finding an optimal number of partitions (i.e., to make 15’s) for a given hand of cards. There’s more to winning than getting high cards, pairs, and runs.
I needed to get my postcards sent off as we’re leaving in only one more day. D.J. was fast asleep by the time we were finished playing cards, but John let me hang out in his room while I wrote my postcards; I had six written by the end of the day.
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.
I woke up, showered, and had another predominantly Western-style breakfast at the Three Gorges Hotel. All the hotels we’ve stayed at offer a very similar breakfast buffet. We departed the hotel around 9 A.M.
We rode the tour buses up to the lookout point of the Three Gorges Project. At the top of this hill, there was a gift shop and a scale model of the dam site. I took pictures and checked out the shop goods. They had some pretty purple jade figures, but they were all very expensive.
We left the lookout point and tried to ride down to the cofferdam, but there was too much congestion on the very narrow road and we had to turn back. We rode up to the top of the dam instead. We were given free reign to walk around the area as we pleased. But there is only so much you can see from the outside. I’m disappointed that we didn’t get to see the dam’s inner workings. I thought the whole purpose of visiting the dam was to explore the engineering behind it. From the outside, our perspective is little better than a tourist’s. We finished up with a group picture at the ground level.
We went back to the hotel to listen to the same presentation delivered by Professor Wang on the boat; only this time, it wasn’t new to us and it was delivered by an uninspiring speaker. It felt like a huge waste of our time. After the presentation, we left the dam site area for a late lunch in Yichang City. After lunch, we caught a 4:05 P.M. flight out of Yichang for Beijing.
After a forty minute bus ride back to the Chang An Grand Hotel in Beijing, the rest of the night was ours. I caught up with a group headed for the Hard Rock Cafe; one of many as it turned out. I had a Hickory Barbeque Bacon Cheeseburger, a Pepsi, and cheesecake for a total of 153 RMB ($18.64) including a 15% service charge. It was the most expensive meal I’ve had on the trip, but in a way it was also the best. I also bought two HRC T-shirts (one for Vance and one for myself) and a HRC glass for Dad. The total came to 410 RMB ($49.94)—again, the most expensive I’ve had on the trip. I retired for the evening when we got back to the hotel.
We were called out of our slumber at the early hour of 6 A.M. We had breakfast on the ship and checked out of the Splendid China at 7:45 A.M. The day would prove to be extremely busy.
We boarded a bus after deboarding the Splendid China and rode to Yichang City (about 40 minutes away). In the city, we found the China Three Gorges University (CTGU), which was formed from two older universities in 2000. We were greeted by a representative of the student body before being paired off for tours with individual students. I first met Lee, a bio-technology major. Lee indicated that I should probably be paired with someone closer to my major. I think they may not recognize Computer Engineering separate from Electrical Engineering, because they could not find an exact match. In the end, I was paired with a Civil Engineering major with the English name Davy (?).
We followed a large group around campus. This group toured the CTGU library, gym, power station simulator, and the grounds in general. We all went to lunch together at one of the school’s dining halls before breaking out into pairs to visit the dormitories.
Davy’s room was located on the second floor of one of the dormitory buildings. His room was comparable to my apartment bedroom except it was home to six students. The room was simplistic: three bunk beds, a few newspapers hung on the walls, a long desk in the center of the room, a water tap for a water jug, and some cubby holes for the residents. Maybe three of the five roommates were home, but the room was soon filled with other students from the building. I guess everybody wanted to see the American. I asked questions and fielded questions in turn. Most of the students spoke some English and I could generally figure out what they were trying to say. Davy translated as necessary. The Chinese students I talked to were perky and spirited. They all seemed to be studying civil engineering, city planning, and hydropower. We talked for one or two hours over various small topics.
After visiting the dorms, the major groupings (EE/IT in my case) reconvened for group discussion and exchange. This seemed like the most disunified event of the day. Most discussion was limited to about three people at most and the groups in different parts of the room were discussing different things. I was asked at several points what my specialization was. I indicated that I did not have a specialization. In a way, computer engineering is a specialization of electrical engineering, but is generally regarded as a distinct major in the United States. I do, however, feel that the university system in the U.S. provides a very broad education and that further specialization is only achieved through electives, co-ops/internships, and further studies in your field. Our system gives a great deal of flexibility to graduates as they settle into the work force, but it also assumes a great deal of initial investment in preparing employees through company-sponsored training. This is a sharp contrast to China’s system where students receive a very focused education preparing them for immediate immersion in a very specific job type. Each system naturally has its advantages and disadvantages.
After the group discussions we left the CTGU campus for dinner at the Three Gorges Corporation building. We were originally slated for a meal at the “Noble Steakhouse” and I think many of us were disappointed by the distinctly un-Western-style food we received.
After dinner, we returned to the CTGU campus for a last hurrah with the Chinese students. Davy was there, so I got to chat with him more and exchange e-mail addresses. The performances alternated between groups with the Chinese students performing many excellent traditional songs and dances and our group representatives repeating many of the performances seen last night. I did not perform. When I think about it, I have never taken the time to develop (or randomly happen upon) any cool parlor tricks. I have a good ear for music but I have the lyrics to only a few songs memorized and most of the music I listen to does not lend itself well to karaoke. After the party, we bid our hosts farewell and made the forty minute bus ride back to the TGP area and our hotel.
