A week in the country

I've just arrived back from Hunan and I'm in the cybercafe passing the time until midday when I can check in to my hotel and have a shower! I've got lots of photos but the cyber cafe I'm in doesn't have the right slot for me to fit my digital camera into! So, photos will come later (so keep checking this post!)

Last monday I got on the overnight sleeper from Shanghai to Changsha in Hunan province. The overnight trains are about 18 carriages long and are seperated into seating carriages and sleepers. I took the sleeper, there are about 60 beds per carriage, split into 6 per compartment. There were two girls from Shanghai in my compartment so we chatted until lights out (10pm!).

I arrived in Changsha the next morning and was met by a student from Zhong Nan Da Xue (Central South University, apparently one of the best in China, possibly the best outside of Shanghai and Beijing) called Xie Wei, and taken to the university. I met the professor who had organised everything for me (it turns out he is very famous, one of the 12 school teachers who's photo hangs in the library). He is the president of the 'Hunan Science and Technoilogy Association' which helped with the organisation and invited us to lunch with them which was at a very nice restaurent with our own room and attendents. The food was very tasty, and I ate lots - in fact, I was the last one eating at the end, although not least because Chinese people eat VERY fast. They also don't hang around after a meal, as soon as I finished, we left and headed to the farm that I and Xie Wei would be staying at, near Yiyang city about 45 minutes drive north of Changsha.

Our farm was about 6km outside of Yiyang, in a very nice little area with lots of rice, fruit trees and fishing ponds. There was a restaurent nearby that a lot of the local aspiring middle classes from the city escaped to at the weekend - we saw a lot of them wondering around (and met a few - see later!). We stayed in a small building that had two bedrooms, each "ensuite" Chinese style (if you don't know you can wait for the photos!). I thought it was great.

We called the farmer Uncle Tang (here uncle and aunt are used as familiar terms for respected older people. Often people will call their cousins or even their good friends brother and sister, which can be confusing at times). He seemed to be an admirer of the great helmsman, whose picture hung in many places throughout the building. He was also a dab hand at Chinese chess: Xie Wei and I played him many times, he only lost once (to me!!). (Chinese chess is a little different to international chess in the number of pieces, the way a few of them move, and the board is a slightly different shape, but a lot of the concepts are transferable. I got tought to play on my last day at Shanghai by one of the other students)

The next day we went for a walk around the surrounding area. Although there are lots of people, because it's not harvest season there is a massive surplus of labour so a lot of people get on the train and go to Guangzhou for a few months to work as labourers. Nevertheless, there were still lots of people about, mostly building things. There is also a power station being built in the background - one of the many new coal fired ones that China is having installed at such a rapid rate.

After our second night, we decided to go to Yiyang and explore the city. We took the bus (just like Shanghai it was 2RMB, or 12p UK) which was very quick and afforded good views of the surroundings. When we got there, Xie Wei suggested we find a cybercafe, which sounded ok to me to check emails etc. It was very funny at first, many people seem to camp in them (they are very cheap) all night and play video games. I needed about 20 minutes to check my emails and things and I was ready to go. Unfortunatly, that was when I discovered Xie Wei's passion for the internet. He trades stocks online. He told me and I think expected me to be impressed. Alas! I tried to explain to him that I'd worked for a bank and seen how much voodoo it all is but to no avail. Two and a half hours later I finally managed to drag him away!

Anyway, after that we had a good walk around Yiyang and had lunch at a middle of the road local restaurent. (I can't remember if I've said before or not, but eating at restaurents is much more common here than in the UK, and doesn't have the luxury associations. It's easy to find a relativly good meal for just a few RMB). We wondered around some streets and examined a local park or two. I've found it hard to find much about the city's history on the internet but from the look of a lot of the city I would say it was probably built up in the '50s during the 'russian' phase here, a lot of very drab tenements in the soviet style!

After a wonder, Xie was eager to get back to the internet bar so I went off for a wander by myself and found another buddhist temple here. I didn't go in: it was quite pricy at 40RMB and to be honest I've seen quite enough of them now!

This has reminded me that I in fact also went to see one in Shanghai that is quite famous before catching my train on monday, it's so difficult to put it all together in my head without the photos! I'll add that bit to this post later. However, midday has now arrived so I'm going to check in and have my first shower in a week that isn't pouring a pot of warm water over myself! You'll have to wait until later to hear the rest and see all the pictures.

Countryside

I've been in the countryside this week and it's been wonderful. Internet access is limited but the student who's accompanied me lives his life on online games so we've made a few trips to a nearby cyber cafe.

This is the farmhouse we've been staying in. I have lots and lots of photos so will add more when I get back to Shanghai. Yesterday we met lots of teachers from a local schooland the english teachers have asked me to go in tomorrow and converse with the students!

The air is fresh and the food is quite nice, much hotter than in SH. However just like in SH they hardly ever drink anything with meals, I think I've been getting quite dehydrated (just bought about 10 bottles of water for the next few days!).

Leaving Uni!

I'm about to leave Shanghai university for good, heading into Shanghai for the weekend and then out to Hunan on Monday (arriving Tuesday). Apparently there is a typhoon there, so it may be a little wet!

Yesterday I went shopping at Shanghai's cheapest bargain road, Cheapalu, where they sell loads and loads of fake things at very low prices. I bought a lot of stuff!

Posts may be a little less frequent for the remaining few weeks of my stay as I'm leaving my computer here when I go, so will be reliant on cybercafes!

On tour

As this is my last week, there were a few things that needed to be done. On monday, another student and I went to the other part of the university to collect my certificate (they've really excelled themselves here, its a lovely one in a nice red covered folder with golden lettering, nice!), and bought my train ticket to Hunan for next week on the way.


In the afternoon, our professor took us to see the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, not far away but there was heavy traffic so it took about an hour to drive each way! They have some fairly advanced kit there and do lots of experiments - some of the students from the university go there to do various things to their samples.


This is our professor admiring a poster of the Pelletron that they have there. It was imported from the states in the 80's but is still very useful. The big round bit was as big as a room, and generates a very high energy ion beam.This can be sent down any of the five tubes and used as a very powerful microscope. It is currently being used a lot by environmental scientists trying to clean up Shanghai's air pollution.

The things that are really standing out to me from the summer are the difference in the amount of experimental work we do at Cambridge and here at Shanghai. I've done 4 years and got a masters already, but the only serious experimental work (besides a few assessed practicals in the first few years) we do is our 4th year project - and even then, mine was computational so not a clamp stand in sight! By contrast, in Shanghai a masters takes 6 years (although they have to study a fair amount of compulsary English and 'Politics' as well during that time), the last two of which are purely practical, doing experiments and publishing papers. Some of the 4th year projects at Cam might have lead to papers, but on the whole we don't start publishing until PhD level. I'm quite looking forward to actually doing some experimental stuff after my time here!


This is an electron microscope they had. The two darker bits on the left were actually made in England - they were imported from one of the more mediocre universities there that shares it's hometown with Oxford Brookes.

Boating on the Huangpu

This week has passed fairly quickly. Got the results for our experiment through on Thursday and I've been playing around with them making some graphs and the like. As I mentioned before, the results were not quite as useful as I might have liked due to the alteration in the process now used at the factory, but it's been fun either way and we'll see what I come up with. We measured lots of weights at different stages in the process which we can use to calculate thicknesses and things, and also power output of the cells which we can compare to thickness, weight etc.


Today (Saturday), I decided to go on the Huangpu River cruise. There are a few versions, but they boil down to a 1-hour tour that basically covers the Bund for about 60 RMB, or a bumper 3-hour cruise 60km downstream to the mouth of the Yangtze and the Pacific Ocean for 150 RMB. Being a purist and on the advice of my guidebook, I went for the longer one. It was good, and my first view of the ocean not from an aeroplane, but in retrospect I think 3 hours is a bit gruelling - advice for others, go for the shorter cruise! Although it is certainly worth doing that one.


Jack plans revolution with his Bolshy buddies near the pier


Leaving Pudong behind...


The gate to the East

Afterwards wondered Xin Tan Di and Huai Hai Lu with a few others (the nice bits of town!) and restaurented and malled. Developed a game for malls: essentially you need to travel the men's floor without retracing your steps, and return to your initial position (if lift, or the down escalator otherwise). The catch is, if there's a plastic clothes model with it's shirt tucked in, that walkway section is forbidden!


blocked!


China's military will soon be able to take over the World, but like the Americans they appear not quite to have grasped 'soft' power yet. Their attempts at cultural supremecy have so far only won over Alan from 'Two and a half men' and my younger, and far wiser brother.

Tomorrow I'm off dragon boating, and then next week (my last!) is quite action packed, with a visit to a couple of other research institutes in Shanghai and possibly poping over to the other campus in Shanghai Uni to see what goes on over there, and hopefully I'm going to be allowed to sit in on some undergrad lectures (which have just started) and see what they're like over here.

For anyone ever frusrated when trying to learn a foreign language...

Pity the souls whose sole aim is to understand this

http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/reading.asp

Living life on the Sky News diet

The PRC takes an active role in helping its citizens to lead upright and moral lives, and so takes it upon itself to help filter out corrupting foreign influences that might lead citizens to question the government, or other unethical activities. The BBC and CNN among others are of course prime examples of foreign scaremongers and rightly blocked in the glorious worker's republic.

With all decent to mediocre news sources blocked, I've been forced to do the unthinkable for the last few weeks and read Sky news. On the plus side, it does have lots of pretty pictures as well as a whole section on the termoils of the McCan family alongside Politics and World News (who's more minor subsections include from time to time the genocide in Darfur and nuclear tension in Iran).

Sensationalise? Us?

Hanzhou, Experiment, Art

Last saturday I went to Hanzhou. As i mentioned before, Hanzhou and Suzhou are supposed to be the most beautiful places in China. Personally, I'd cut Suzhou out of the list: Hanzhou was much nicer! It's a medium sized city built around a huge and lovely lake, surrounded by hills with tea plantations and lots of temples and pagodas. The gardens of Suzhou are indeed beautiful, but all of Hanzhou is.

We arrived quite late (circa 9.30pm), but were able to relativly quickly find a restaurent that opened late (cf. McD's in Suzhou!), before retreating to a moderatly priced hotel. However, their air conditioning was broken, so they shipped us upmarket for the first night for free! What a score. Next morning we had a breakfast buffet, all you want of a wide array of eastern and western foods.

I knew that my friend and regular blog correspondant Lisa Gao had planned to come to China at some point this holiday, but I hadn't expected to find her in my fruit bowl at the hotel

Breakfast isn't big in China so its always slightly eclectic, but not here. Lots of chinese dumplings, noodles etc., but also the full array of bacon, potatoes, cereal, cold milk, fruit, fruit juice, french pastires etc - I stuffed myself full for the day.

On sunday we visited the Lingyin Temple, a big budhist temple. It's just over the hill from the lake and is in the middle of the tea growing areas. Next to it is a famous hill called "Hill flown in from afar" after a travelling Indian buddhist mistook it for a hill from home which it resembled, which we climbed. The temple itself is still home to several buddhist monks, who climb another even taller hill each day on their hands and knees to visit another temple (which you can just see at the top of the tea field photo below, with a cable car for lazy tourists), and clean, worship and practice martial arts (allegedly). They seem to have struck on a winning revenue stream though - there are thusands of tourists daily, who come to burn incense and worship their family gods (apparently buddhism adopted gods when it reached china).

buddhas carved into 'hill flown from afar'

despite numerous signs informing that for true buddhists piety is more important than incense, the vendors outside still made a healthy taking. The chinese aren't the most religious of people, but they have a very special way of sinocising foreign ones

Buddhism, much like Islam, is a religion of peace

After the temple, we went to try and find the tea museum, but it was unfortunatly out of season. Instead, we got taken to one of the tea villages to a little tea huse to have tea explained to us by a local woman. We wondered the village for a bit and bought some overpriced locally cut stuff, then returned to our original hotel (unfortunatly repaired!) for a shower.

proof I was there

A tea field. I want one of these!

In the evening we went to a nice restaurent on the lake (my first glimpse of it so far!) that was packed, apparently Zhou En Lai ate there back in the day so it's always popular with domestic tourists. We wondered a bit afterwards, along one of the long causeways that cross the lake, before returning to the hotel.

We woke early the next morning for another marginally less impressive breakfast, less bacon and more rice but still palatable. No black tea either unfortunatly. We went back to the lake and hired bicycles from one of the many hire places around the lake and cycled round it for a few hours, which was really good fun and very pretty.

part of Hanzhu's beautiful West Lake

It was almost time to go after this, we had lunch at a nice Guangdong themed restaurent (the bit of China nearest Hong Kong, known for eating anything!) and headed back to Shanghai in the glorius monday sunshine.

All was good until I got back home, and discovered to my horror (and for the second time) that I'd lost my debit card. Further, my laptop seemed well and truly broken and I was a bit gutted. Luckily, some frantic calls later revealed that it had been left in the first hotel, they were very good and sent it off almost straight away. Laptop was less positive.

On tuesday Professor Ma arrived back, and the students and I and he discussed various plans for experiments. I got the go-ahead for mine, and my and another student decided to travel over to Pudong on wednesday evening. It was Yaoyao's birthday dinner in shanghai that night in Shanghai, she took several of us to an 'italian' restaurent. It's no wonder that Chinese people think they don't like western food - the imitation is pale (much like chinese takeaway in the UK i'm sure!). The pizzas we had were greasy, covered in horrible rubbery cheese, not a tomato i sight, the tuna (I'm a big fan of napolitana in the UK...) could have come from a can, not enough vinegar, bread too thick, no chilli oil, no pepper mill, etc... The potato salad side order was very good, however!

In the day on Wednesday we had some american visitors to the lab who I chatted to for a bit, they were the investors from the company but seemed to be more on the business than the science side. When we arrived at the company that afternoon I saw them again and told them my plans! It was late so I and the student (his english name is Bob!) headed to the dormitary nearby to start the next morning.

Our village, complete with a few words from the big man himself (5 ft 0 Deng. Party man Bob is a very big fan)

The village that the dorm is in is right on the outskirts of Shanghai where it merges with the countryside (and the coast!), and I've got some good photos of it. When I left it before a few weeks back, some workers had been clearing weeds from a large area of ground, which has now just about been turned into a nice paved area with trees and benches. Development is rapid.

then

and now

Shanghai's eastern edge

By Thursday morning, I was very keen to get by experiment under way. I'd spent some time fighting through paperwork, and finally got to the factory floor by about 10am, to find that the crucial stage of the process for my experiment is no longer used! We had to adjust it somewhat, and the results were less useful that I'd hoped. However, carrying it out was good fun and the company are planning to do my original experiment themselves at some point now which is great.

We finished early on Friday afternoon, and Bob and I returned via SHanghai centre. We went to a nice little market, and did some souvenir shopping. I have purchased a Chinese chess set which I now need to learn to play, and several other amusing nicnaks. I also aquired the newest harry potter for 20 RMB (1 pound 30) and a compilation of shakespeare plays in english and chinese.

Certified 'World VIP' Ma Sun carves me a name stamp

On Friday night I went out with Valencia and Kenny and several others, first to an interesting club in south Shanghai called 'Absolute House', before moving on to Attica. As usual Valencia had obtained us free entry to both places and drinks so the night was very cheap. After we left attica we wondered shanghai and ate funny shellfish as the sun came up!

On Saturday I went with Toshiba to Century Park - a very large park in central pudong not far from the Jin Mao tower. It was very nice, with a big lake in the middle that we were able to hire a boat and sail around on for a bit! After that we went to see the latest Harry Potter in the cinema (I'm not addicted!) and had dinner at an italian place much nicer than the one I went to on tuesday! Still not enough tomato tho and very overpriced this time: someone needs to bring Pizza Express or ASK here.

captain Jack

Shiji Park

On sunday, Valencia wanted to go to the Shanghai art museum. Very tired from the busy week I skipped Dragonboating to sleep, and on a whim joined her in the afternoon to go and see the special exhibit: lots of Gaudi's work from early 20th century Spain. We explored people's square afterwards, and got the usual approaches from 'tea shop' people trying to get money out of us - she was very surprised, and said it was a totally different experience from when she was alone! She thinks they might not know how to deal with a western woman, but I put it more down to her fluent Chinese - a good few people were taken by surprise when she jabbered back at them!

Gaudi was a big fan of 'hyperbolic perabaloids'. Obviously.

upstairs they had quite an strange mix of his furniture

he had a change of heart on his death bed - form AND function

Anyway, she had had to visit a nearby restaurent at some point as part of her job, called Saigon Blue, so we decided to have dinner there (unsurprisingly Vietnamese). It was a lovely little restaurent but a little bit out of the way, a few streets south of Nanjing Road and not quite in the french concession, and also hidden by a large strange hotel-like building (but not a hotel, apparently) called the 'Overseas Chinese Development Center'. You had to actaully leave the restaurent and enter the building to go to the loo, which might have been cold in the winter and felt a little strange! They want to change the place into a bar with V's company's help, but she wasn't massivly enthused. The food was very good though: we had lots of fresh veg in salads and spring rolls, which made me realise how much I've missed them - almost all vegetables here are stir fried or cooked in sauce (side note: I also spotted a subway tucked away near people's square which I will be visiting SOON!).

We wondered a little bit afterward before heading our seperate ways - she made me laugh at one point by suggesting we go for a foot massage - before I realised she was serious! After all the dodgy 'massaji' calls that one hears outside clubs in the early morning I wouldn't even have thought about it, but she told me about the wonderful massage she'd had the week before. It's a very different experience here for men and women! She has promised to take me with her next time she goes to translate for me and guarantee no unexpected surprises!

Laptop broken!

My laptop has broken so posts may be a little less frequent until (if!!) it starts working again.

Going to Hanzhou this afternoon for another tour - another beautiful little city about an hour and a half away on the train thats built on a lake and is supposed to be lovely.

I'll be back on Monday afternoon in time to get Prof Ma to hopefully take me to the company on tuesday. (Although the lab here apparently has some international visitors on Wednesday so I can't help thinking he might contrive to take me on Thursday to show off his exchange student!)

Experiment

I got a good news phone call this morning from one of the guys at the solar panel ompany, they've decided to let me do the experiment that I've been planning for a bit! Basically the massive majority of the cost of solar panels is the silicon that they use for it itself. It has to be so pure that they need some very energy intensive methods to purify it far enough (solar panels aren't quite as green as people like to think, they spend about half of their lives paying back the energy it cost to make them and they also leave a trail of chemical nasties) which is expensive. Consequently, people are looking at many new types of panel that need less material to work.

The easiest solution, of course, is simply to use thinner panels - which is exactly what I want to try. The problems include that they will be more fragile, and also that they will bend more during the sintering (heatin at about 500 degrees C) that they undergo, which might make them not work. On the other hand, any thickness reduction means big cost cuts, so it might be worth it. I want to basically thin some slices down about 10 or 20% and see what the effect is on their power output at the end, it's something that they've been interested in before but haven't actually tried yet, and I think they're keen to see what happens. They also have a new machine fairly recently that will allow very good thickness measurements.

My professor returns on Monday, so I'll probably try and get over there on tuesday to begin, and it might take the rest of the week to get done, but should be a lot of fun!

In other news, I finally cracked last night at the expat event and ordered the following monster:


I've been told on certain streets you can even find proper Turkish kebabs in polystyrene boxes, so I'm going to have to hunt one of those down next time. There is documentary proof of my betrayal of chinese food at http://www.shanghaiexpat.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album06&id=IMG_1010_001&op=modload&name=mdGallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php it's photo 19 if it doesn't come up automatically!

After the expat event Valencia got us guestlist entry and free drinks at the surprisingly retro disco club G Plus in a swanky mall in Xin Tan Di (her company helps market things in Shanghai. Apparently the locals tend to spend more in clubs than stingey foreigners, but they prefer clubs that have a few around and thus spend even more, so clubs like to encourage us to visit them). Very good club with good music and a very '80s mirrored theme, my only complaint (as with so many clubs here) was the narrow passageways and the insane amount of space dedicated to tables (which is how clubs here seem to make most of their money). On the whole big thumbs up tho!

How NOT to seduce a beautiful peasent girl...

Back when I was working in the company at Pudong, I got ton know some of the workers there quite well. As with everything here, it was very heirachical and segmented. To get a good job (engineer!), you need most likly a masters degree or better PhD, and a very good recommendation from your teacher. Alternativly, if you have a bachelor's degree and your teacher knows someone who works in the company, that's probably ok - in fact you'll probably even earn a little more than the masters candidate, or if you have studied abroad they'll snap you up (and give you a big salary bonus!). Basic salery here is about 3000 RMB a month, and there are reasonable promotion opportunities after a few years I'm led to believe.

If you started work after school, you become a worker, and that's more or less as far as you will go (one worker who had lots of experience and defected to the company from another one became the forewoman in her room, and got abot 20 more than the average worker. After 9 years.). You wear different clothes to the engineers to highlight the difference, work at the same station for months on end (although it wasn't quite the sweatshop hours I was expecting, usually about 8-5 with free lunch provided at the onsite canteen) and generally do whatever you're told. You earn about 1000 RMB a month, probably share a room with another worker for about 200 RMB of that each, spend another 200 or so on food and transport, and end up with about 600 RMB each month. Not the greatest of jobs.

However they all work with a smile and are generally really friendly, although none speak English (but they know the premiership results better than me) and often don't even speak regular mandarin chinese all that well (so I'm told), prefering their local dialect.

Since the student engineers there have some time on their hands, and there is a set of benches near one particular work bench, we got to know the workers there very well. One was a very pretty girl from Anhui province (reknowned for being undeveloped) who was very chatty and generally amusing. She took it upon herself to teach me Chinese in her spare time during the day, then stole my mobile number from another engineer andbegan a texting campaign, letting it be known that she wanted to be invited out to dinner.

Great, I thought, a chance to get to know someone a little different from the rest of the Shanghai croud (Shanghai, everyone says, is very different to the rest of China; much more modern, fast paced and materialistic). So I invited her to a restaurant for dinner one time... or that's what I thought.

I was a bit surprised when she said no, after all the efforts she'd gone to, but recently I found out why. I'd asked her to a fan dian. Now fan is rice, which is used very often here to mean food generally, and dian is a building or shop. However, apparently when you put the two together it means... hotel! I bit my lip but couldn't help chuckling inside when I found that out a couple of days ago, another Chinese mystery explained!

For all you Romeo's out there, a much better way to ask a girl to dinner is, as I now know, "Wo (time and date) qing ni qu chi fan", literally 'I invite you to eat rice' - the same fan but not a dian in sight!

An Underground European Club-Bar

This Saturday I toured the Shanghai Development Office in People's Square. Now as dull as that might sound, it's actually a Museum and they get lots of recommendations because on one of the floors, they have a cardboard replica of most of the city, with every building and tree painstakingly recreated. It just goes to show how far out I've been living that neither of my residences so far were on it, which was a disappointment!

Cardboard cutout vs. the real deal!

In fact, the whole place was pretty dull, I wouldn't suggest this to any would-be tourists.

Anway, it rained all afternoon so we sheltered in the tea room and then went to a restaurant for dinner. I had arranged to go clubbing as a smart club with Kenny, but all of us were in shorts and sandals and decided it was just too much effort to all go and get changed. Luckily, one of the germans with us knew a club called Pirates! that apparently wouldn't mind sandals, so we re-arranged plans and went there instead.

Well, Pirates! had absolutly no-one inside, so we went to the bar just down the road from it, Logo. The entrance was a dark door but inside was great, lots of old sofas and a small bar area at the back. 20 RMB entrance and drinks at 30 RMB, it was very relaxed and not trying to be anything like so many of the clubs here. It had a very European feel to it, the only problem was thatit was slightly smokey (it even had European toilets, although they were unisex and weren't in that great a condition)

Later on, a local band came in and played, they were really good! One of our friends Valencia (american, but has a thing for long-haired asian men) fell in love with the lead singer and we spent a lot of the evening trying to get her an autograph.

Floopy haired local bad-boy (love interest??!)

When we got bored here, we heard rumours about another after hours bar in the vicinity and spent about two hours trying to find it and also find something to eat nearby (we wanted dumplings but all wecould find was hotpot, which wasn't going to do in our condition). We didn't find it but did see some funny early morning scenes (lots of fights between locals, mostly).

Suzhou

I've been back from Suzhou for a few days and its about time I wrote about it!

I was very impressed with myself for buying train tickets there and back in Chinese, they cost about £4 between them for about an hours journey each, Network Rail could learn something about pricing policy here.

Suzhou is renowned throughout China for its beautiful gardens and its beautiful women. On my arrival, I was 'befriended' by a motorcycle taxi guy, and since it was baking hot I thought I might as well let him take me into town. He didn't speak a word of English, so the conversation was interesting. In the absense of clear instructions, he apparently used his inititave and decided which of Suzhou's delights I would be more interested in seeing. We turned up outside a very dodgy looking "KTV" that he wanted to take me into. I walked off but he followed me, and this time I said "park" in Chinese very clearly! I'd already paid him for the trip here so he said he'd take me to a park instead, and we went to a very nice lesser-known park called Dong Yuan (East Garden) that was only 10 RMB entry.



Chinese gardens, unlike western ones, do not try to improve upon nature, but instead create an atmosphere conducive to relaxation and thoughtfulness, according to my guidebook.


Apparently this is well achieved via Communist pandas.

In addition, Dong Yuan also had a zoo! It was so hot that most of the creatures (and zoo keepers!) were asleep in their enclosures. They had a lion that wasn't very ferocious, but they did have a really powerful looking tiger! (In China, the tiger is the king of the animals, because the marks on his head look like the chinese character for king, Wang)



Look closely and you'll notice that these fish have very funny bulgey eyes. I was very excited by them, but every Chinese person I've shown them to has been unimpressed - apparently they're fairly common here.

After looking around the garden, I decided it was time to find a hotel. My guidebook had listed a few, but they were all at the upper end of my spending plan. The motorcycle taxi guy still wouldn't go away which was becoming annoying, but he didn't ask for more money either (although I did pay for his Dong Yuan ticket). I decided he could make himself useful and take me to a hotel - I told him I was looking to spend 400-500 RMB, and to be fair to him he found me a nice one a little way outside the city centre that was only 300. I headed to my room and he still wouldn't go away, which was now a little worrying. We chatted for a little bit before I told hism I wanted to sleep and he should go. I'd earlier told him I was meeting friends later to try an encourage him to leave, and he wanted to come and meet us later. Then he decided he wanted to borrow my digital camera (which I'd told him cost me about £50, or 700 RMB, although actually it was a fair bit more) to take pictures of his girlfriend, and return it to me that night. Well, obviously, this was it, so I told him to be gone, and he moaned and said I owed him 4 RMB for the transport (24p), which I gladly gave him, locked the door, and went to have a shower. He hung around for a bit knocking but finally got the message and left.

I didn't realise until the next day, but he'd taken the recipt for my 100 RMB deposit on the room, so I wasn't able to get it back which was a bugger, but I'm told that if 100 RMB is all I've lost in China due to scams, I'm not doing too badly. I pinched a couple of towels from the hotel to make sure that he wasn't able to go and get the deposit himself!

I have a few Shanghai friends who work in Suzhou, and I aranged to meet them that evening to look around. Unfortunatly Mark (see earlier post, "The Plot Thickens...") had a short notice commitment so couldn't make it, but my other guide YaoYao showed me some of the sights, a massive artificial lake with a big island in the middle (they put the island in afterwards by draining the lake, pretty impressive stuff, but the photos came out badly). Suzhou really isn't Shanghai though - we were looking for a restaurant at about 10.30pm (an easy feat in Shanghai), but despite finding many nice-looking ones, they were all about to close, and we finally had to settle for McDonalds. (although I secretly wasn't upset - chips and tomato ketchup! A chunk of meat in bread!)

Me looking very smug with my Western food

Not the recommended way to mentain that figure...

The next day, I had breakfast in the hotel Chinese style. I'm not certain but SOMETHING seriously disturbed my system for a long time from about 16 hours later and I suspect the rice porridge might not have been made using boiled water (it was certainly tap water from the taste, but that shouldn't be a problem if it's been boiled), and I drank lots of it! Incidentally, I and Chris have both noticed how Chinese drink much less with their meals than westerners, and it tends to be warm or hot drinks as opposed to cold ones. We've both become coke drinkers because its about the only drink regularly chilled!

On Yaoyao's suggestion, I checked out "The Humble Administrator's Garden", the most famous garden in Suzhou. The entrence fee is 70 RMB (!!) but the garden is large and fairly spectacular so it wasn't so bad.


Photograph slave that I have become, I was distraught when my camera ran out of battery in the middle of the garden. You aren't seeing the bansai tree garden, the bamboo meditation chamber, or lots of other lovely spots.


The garden gets its name from a certain Imperial beaurocrat whoretired and returned to suzhou and made this garden. He is supposed to have said, in the noblest vein, that "To stay at home tending his garden and selling his vegetable crop, is the policy of a humble man". However, his garden covers over 50,000 square metres, with buildings, boulders, lakes and landscaped hills. I can't help thinking it took considerably more than one humble man to build. Some things never change.

After leaving the garden, I fancied a trip on a boat around the canals of Suzhou (Marco Polo called it 'the Venice of the East'). Another local who spoke no English said he'd take me to one for 5 RMB on his pedlo. We set off and it was great fun, then I noticed that we were crossing the river instead of going to boats - and ended up outside another KTV with pictures of pouting movie star girls on the outside. He kept saying something about how cheap it was (I'm now sure that they're on some commission) and a horde of girls appeared saying it was happy hour (I was incredibly happy when one bumped her head on the bike when trying to get into the seat to talk to me). When he realised that he wasn't getting his commission for the day, the cycle driver turned nasty and complained about the wet sweat patch I'd left on his bike seat. But he was 5 foot 4 and as skinny as a beanpole, and by now thoroughly fed up with locals I practiced some of the bad language I've learned to date on him.

It was by this stage a bit late for a boat ride since my train was leaving fairly early, so instead I decided to walk back to the station with my spare hour, which was very nice and pleasently local free.

On balance, the gardens of Suzhou are everything they're said to be and definatly worth a visit. Taxis are incredibly cheap here as well. However more than one day here could rapidly become too much, both Mark and YaoYao look forwards to the weekends when they can get back to SH. It's just a little bit too slow, despite being a reasonably sized city. Not a scratch on Shanghai!

Disaster

Some of you may have noticed the lack of physics-reated posts over the last week or so. I was going to wait until I had photos but since I'm going away for a few days now seems an appropriate juncture. We had an accident in the lab on sunday, it was basically flooded by a tap left on all nigh, so there have been no expriments this week and I've instead been focusing on my Chinese.

Was talking to an American chap last night who's here researching lukemia (shanghai has a fairly high incidence of a certain type of it, apparently) and it was very interesting chatting about the difference in research cultures here and in the West.

Anyhow, the lack of research made me feel that it was a good tim to take a holiday, and today I'm off to Suzhou, China's garden city, for a few days.

Jin Mao

My friend Chris from the UK is in town - we took Chinese classes together last year so shared our teacher's amusing quest to grasp all things British. Also, my new debit card was here, so we decided to paint the town red (well...).

We took the tourist tunnel under the river to Pudong, which is a bizarre tram-like vechile that moves through a strange tunnel of lights that might be trying to simulate LSD. Unfortunatly I didn't disable the flash on my camera and none of the photos came out very well.

Chris had told me about this nice buffet meal served in a certain Grand Hyatt hotel, but we didn't quite know where it was, so we asked directions, and were pointed to...

Yup, that's right, I ate up there. (recycled photo I know - it didn't come out so well at night)

It was rather divine, we partook gladly and plentifully.


Clockwise from top: smoked salmon, POTATOES* with onion and bacon, prawns in garlic, pork cutlet, ROAST BEEF**, antipasto, fish, BEEF CARPACCIO (WITH SHAVED PARMESIAN*!!!), some shellfish. * - much needed

They had also committed the cardinal sin for any buffet meal, and included sorbet in the dessert. Chris displayed a typical northern lack of restraint on the dessert


While I, with my superior southern breeding, was much more civilised:

(I couldn't find the big plates)

We had a window seat and were able to enjoy the Shanghai skyline much more nicely from the 56th floor (about 2/3 of the way up). It's only when you're there that you realise how much taller than everything else Jin Mao really is. We eventually managed to disable my camera's flash and get some skyline pictures of mediocre quality

Citigroup always was a second rate excuse for a bank

Price tag for the evening: 450RMB each - less than I paid for my Lacrosse annual dinner back home.

After dinner, we wondered Pudong breifly and happened upon a breif note from our sponsors - Chris and I were both given £400 by a certain fund back in the UK, and we were sure they'd approve of our recent investment in the Shanghai property/eatery market


We like these people. The Chinese couple we ambushed to take the photo perhaps didn't quite understand...