A Busy Weekend!

I haven't posted for a few days: it's been a very busy weekend and I needed until now to catch up on the sleep!

On thursday I had dinner with a few people in Shanghai, which transformed into a rather late excursion to the before-mentioned Bonbons and a fairly late (early) return home. Friday was my last day at the company, so it was fortunatly rather light on the work front - trying to get some last bits of data and looking around the place a final time.

In the afternoon Prof. Ma returned me to Puxi via his daughters work, they invited me to dinner on Sunday chez Ma, whch is very close to the university - with the promise of Baijiu, the chinese national spirit.

Saturday was the real beginning: went into town to meet a friend for breakfast, and had my first experience of People's Square as a lone foreigner - totally different! I'd heard about this scam where a group of young female students 'befriend' you saying they want to practice their english, then take you to some teahouse where you end up getting charged a massivly inflated bill for a few cups of tea - as well as reading it on the internet, my friend Neil warned me about it: he'd been scammed for 400 RMB on the first day (they tried to take 1000!).

It hadn't happened to me yet but I wasn't surprised, I obviously don't look like the kind of guy that would fall for a scam. Or perhaps I do. Within 20 minutes of arriving (got in half an hour early due to mistiming busses!) it'd been tried on me twice. It really is very cleaver, but of course forwarned is forarmed and I got rid of them. When I came back hours later one pair were still there - apparently they'd 'got lost' and asked me for some directions!

That afternoon (to my eternal shame I forgot my camera for the whole weekend so have no photos of any of this) I met up with more friends - James and Ziyang from my course in Cambridge and a few of their friends, and went to KTV! KTV is karioke, but its massivly popular here, occupying about the same cultural space as going out for drinks. You get a room with the karioke stuff, order foor and drinks, and sing away to each other for several hour, and its as much fun as it sounds, although the only english songs they have are dodgy britney covers and the omnipresent Backstreet Boys (the supermarket near where I lived in Pudong played the BB greatest hits album on loop - but frustratingly didn't have a dance floor!).

Afterwards we went to a Guangzhou restaurent (Guangzhou (formerly Canton) is in the south of China near Hong Kong, and its people are famous for eating almot anything. There was a recent field mouse epidemic in central china where 2,000,000,000 field mice chomped through thousands of acres of cropland, but the farmers were able to make up their losses by exporting live mice to Guangzhou instead). We ate donkey and rabbit among other things and it was all rather tasty!

Afterwards I nipped briefly home to change and shower and make a rapid turnaround, before heading back into town to visit Attica, one of Shanghai's most famous scenes. It's on the roof of one of the buildings of the Bund (by this stage the loss of a camera was really getting to me!) and priced accordingly. It had two really nice rooms and a lovely outdoor bar area, and the clientelle were slightly more resectable than those in bonbons. We knew a few people there (someone in the Taiwanese mafia allegedly?!) and chatted and danced until about 4am. Clubbing here seems much less down-all-you-can-and-act-stupid oriented, although that may be because the people who I go out with don't drink that much, but it's actually much more fun and much less expensive. We also met lots more people, my Shanghai circle is growing!

Since we left at 4.30am and dragonboating starts at 8, I'd made the prior decision not to return home, and brought a bag with me to the club. The one weakness of Attica is that the cloakroom ONLY takes coats - we argued this one for a bit, and despite my bag containing nothing valuble the assisstant wouldn't give in, luckily it wasn't a bulky sports bag or anything and despite looking slightly metro, it wasn't so bad.

Crossed the city early in the morning and saw some interesting sights (camera loss now chaffing). McDonalds is open 24/7 near the bund, but the only people actually eating were a few groups of foreign lads clearly just out of a club too. However, most of the tables were occupied by sleeping locals - literally just head down on the tables like those funny mushroom people in Voyage of the Dawn Treader! Another open square was covered in homeless - so many here.

The subway is shut from 10.30pm - 6am which really makes me appreciate London's 1.00am-ish, although I wish more cities would follow NY's 24h example! Got to the DB pickup at about 6.45 and dozed by a wall for a bit until 8, then dozed a bit more on the coach. We had about 40 people this week: enough for two boats and races!

It was by far the hottest day so far and with no cloud cover. I borrowed some sun cream but it wasn't as good as my factor 40 stuff and rapidly washed off in the spashing. Despite the races being great fun, I knew it was just a matter of time until the strawberry look arrived!

I was meeting up with some more friends afterwards to explore Shanghai further and we popped down to a temple called Yu Yuan Temple, a former temple of Taoism and now a shopping mall and tourist area (the buildings are preserved and it's very pretty), with a little bit of temple left and some god statues that you can go and bow to if you're into that stuff (I and my guides of course were) and we were there for a while as the morning's sun turned into a heavy downpour outside.

We wondered the backstreets of Shanghai towards the bund and stopped for tea in a teashop (a very reasonable 2 RMB / cup, although my guides, who don't speak the loca Shanghai dialect, could only point and gesture, a great equalising experience!), and came to the far end of the bund. Got a ferry across (another 2 RMB!) and wandered Pudong breifly before I had to head back to my apartment for that night's dinner!

Evening came and I was picked up by the professor and headed to his. We had lots and lots of dishes (off the top of my head; peanut chicken, steamed fish, braised beef, a kind of local shellfish, several vegetables, fruit, left VERY full!) all of which were most tasty, and the promised maotai - the best brand of baijiu. It is about 56% alcohol, but much tastier than vodka, and between us I and the professor had the better part of a (small!) bottle. At this stage I was slightly concerned about how I would get home, but fortunatly Mrs. Ma (also a teacher at Shanghai Daxue) said she'd take me home!

Haven't been up to much besides work since, except to say that:

++=

Real* Tea! I was like a heroin addict drinking this. And yes, despite being packaged in the UK, all the ingredients are individually chinese!

Another rule

another rule to add to the clothing post from last week:

9. Unless you have at least 5 years chopstick experience, do NOT wear good clothes to restaurents focusing on noodles, hot pot, or any soup-based dishes

Not worth the paper?

We've all heard the story about the dollar bill: how the treasury would love to change to coins but the population are just too attached to the old greenback. Coins can last for 30 years, while most notes circulate for about 18 months before needing to be reissued, leading to millions a year in reprinting costs. In the UK the smallest note is £5, worth about ten times as much, and the euro goes further with EU 10 as its smallest note denomination.

Yet again, the Chinese weren't to be beaten. Into my possession yesterday came a 1 Jiao note. There are 10 Jiao in one RMB, and 15 RMB is about £1, so three of these notes are worth about 2p.


To be fair, I don't think they circulate very rapidly anymore... (this one is from 1980!)


And the designers of movie boxes over here perhaps still have something to learn about choosing their reviewers...

A Linguistic Stu

OK this resolution of a long-running problem is totally worth its own blog entry.

Ever since I've been here (and in fact, before), I've been sure I've heard Chinese people say a word or words in conversation that sounds very like a particularly familiar greeting used amoung certain ethnic minorities in the UK.

Every time I asked a Chinese speaker, they stared at me blankly (even the bilingual ones), and my attempts to get students over here to stop mid-sentence when I heard it were equally unsuccessful.

I gave up, thinking I must be paranoid. However, the first question Seigo and Jono asked on their recent visit was, sure enough, what does *that word* mean here?!

Well today after a particularly heavy meeting session hearing it many times, I finally took my problem to the internet (and this took guts!). Surprisingly enough, the very first entry resolved my problem - apparently we weren't the first to notice it.

http://eastweststation.com/blog/2007/04/30/nigger-niggernei-ge-nei-ge/

Two nights in Shanghai

This weekend was fairly busy, and I'm finally getting round to writing an update about it. On thursday and friday night Seigo and Jono were in Shanghai on their massive world tour from Moscow to Thailand. Thursday, being a work night, we went out for a respectable meal at a restaurent in town and tried to order food from the confused waitress in rubbish phrasebook Chinese (she didn't seem to understand any of the CHinese I'd learn over the past three weeks - or perhaps didn't want to tell me where she lived!). The meal was very interesting, a little boiling pot of broth which you put bits of meatinto to cook. No rice, no veg, no fuss, and some really nice sauces.


Friday night we'd heard about a club called bonbons that we were keen to check out. Entrance was RMB 120 (about £8), but once inside it was an open bar. This drew our attention pretty sharply, and after another pointy meal at a nearby joint we headed straight over.

The setup in the club was amazing. Once inside you swapped your ticket for a drink, then when you want another you swap your empty bottle or glass for the new one, saving them hassle with table cleaners! We got chatting to a Chinese guy who had had the forsight to make a reservation (for which you need a group of 10) and who had a table reserved in a quiet area. We joined them and played a few hours of entertaining drinking games, had a dance and chatted to some other people. Jono took lots of photos so in a few weeks I'm sure they'll be in my possession.

We left at about 4 and struggled to a nearby bar, but that was a bit quiet as well. We had to fight our way through crouds of child beggars and prostitutes (and also those cyncal flower sellers who approach couples and emotionally blackmail the man to buy a flower) to escape to the nearest taxis and get away.

Saturday day was mostly sleeping - I pity Jono and Sog who had to get a 12 o'clock ferry to head off to Japan. However, I'd arranged to go out with one of the expat lads from last week (Bonbons again), and another guy he'd befriended at the pub, plus a couple of girls we'd met later at a salsa bar. I invited the guy we'd met on Friday and all of the sudden we had a party! It started to rain as soon as I got off the underground, but Chinese are the true capitalists, within moments there were entrepreneurs selling umbrellas for 20 kwai. Again it was really good, the DJ had lots of competitions (trying to find the most beautiful woman in the club or something...) and we danced until very early in the morning.

After two all night bonanzas, Sunday was very relaxed. Me and a housemate had dinner at the local restaurent. It had about space for three tables and was basically in the middle of a maze field, but the food was very satisfying and inexpensive.

Shanghai Solar!

This one is going to be a little technical, my parents have asked for an update on my activities here inside work, so if you're not interested in physics, solar panels, or the physics of solar panels, you might as well skip it.

Last week started off mostly organisational, and I spent the first few days touring the factory working out how everything works and what gets done. The production line is manned about 16 hours a day (there are three work teams that rotate), but there are also teams of engineers, who are there to fix problems, manage, and I think also deal with clients and expriment and things.

So after a few days, I wanted to do something.There is a control room in the factory where all the cells get tested before being assembled onto the panels, and the room also has a few other testing devices. One of them tests reflectivity of a sample, and since it was available, I thought I'd use it. At each stage of the production there are a few breakages, so I used some of these from different stages to check how reflective they were. Most interestingly, one of the stages involves aving the cells sprayed with titanium dioxide to form an anti-reflective layer. If light hits bare silicon, a significant portion of the energy is reflected away because light travels so much more slowly inside it than it does in the air (this is roughly why you can see a faint reflection of yourself in glass windows, since not all of the light that bounces off your face passes straight through the window, a small amount bounces back. If you look at a window that doesn't have much light coming from the other side, eg. look outside at night, it's much easier to see this effect). It turns out that if you choose an intermediate layer perfectly and have the right (very thin) thickness, you can stop all light of a certain wavelength from being reflected, and significantly reduce reflection at other wavelengths. Glasses and camera lenses use this effect, camera lenses look a bit purpley because they block green reflectionmore-or-less totally, but only reduce the red and blue reflection (which are on either side of green). Red + blue = purple.

In the factory, this layer is currently applied by people with spray guns and they judge the thckness by the colour of the sample (because it changes the reflective properties, the colour also changes as the spray is applied. Some factories use a more advanced piece of kit - they're gettig one fitted here in december - that is more accurate and improves power output of the finished cells by about 10%). I wanted to see what the measured reflectivity was with a bit less spray than usual and a bit more than usual (and of course the normal amount as a control and no spray as another control). The other student engineers were keen to help - they seem not to have much to do in the factory and hadn't really thought about doing their own experiments.

I got some data last friday from one set of samples, and was planning to get lots more early this week. Unfortunatly, however, the machine has broken and I haven't been able to get more data. (It wasn't actually due to me! I think they were quite interested in my idea, last Thursday my professor told one of the students looking after me that he should do a similar experiment, 20 samples from each stage and measure the reflectivity, but being much more careful about getting samples from the same batch, etc, as a longer term experiment. So the machine was getting a lot of use and at somepoint seems to have given up! There's another component coming next week to fix it).

So this week I've been putting together a model of the reflective properties using excel (and a lot of notebook space! Both my pens ran out on the same day and it was surprisingly tough to obtain a new one!). It's a fairly simple model but without access to my notes from the last few years it's taken abit of time to get my brain back into gear, although quite fun to have a go. I've been able to find silicon's refractive index data on the internet (refractive index is hw fast light travels inside it compared to a vacuum, and has a lot of effect on its reflective/refractive properties. A pencil in a glass of water looks bent because water has a higher refractive index than air, so the light bends on entry). I've been trying to fit the model to the dat I got last week, although to be honest one set of samples is far too few to be considered scientific, so I'm going to collect more data as soon as the machine starts to work again.


The model with the anti-reflective layer is a bit more complicated because of various different reflections inside the layer itself that depend on the thickness in quite a complicated way and all interfere with one another. However, the model is quite good and I've now adjusted it to take account of silicon's low wavelength behaviour as well.

Yesterday I was also looking at the absorption of sunlight by solar cells. A good 95% or so of all solar panels are the basic silicon ones like the ones they make here. There is lots of innovation around the world about other types, but most are constrained by cost or still very young technology. Unfortunatly, the maximum possible efficiency (the proportion of incident solar radiation that gets turned into electricity) in a normal silicon cell is about 32%, and most real cells are lower - the ones they make here are about 16% efficient. This limit is due partly to the solar spectrum, much of which falls at wavelengths that are too long to excite the electrons inside the silicon, and also due to the way that electrons that are excited behave - a lot of their energy is converted into heat inside the cell. There are lots of ideas about how to improve this (such as using mirrors to concentrate the light, altering the spectrum using clever materials, or using thing other than silicon) and I've been studying a review paper on the topic, but at the moment these are all some way from being practical.


Next week I'll get more data and then see where to go from there, and then after that I'll be back in the lab as Shanghai University which will have finished its refurbishment and able to try out some new experiments!

ps. Whats happening with Russia? Getting snippets on the news but noone here knows how to translate it. I *would* check the news websites, but it seems anything with 'news' in the website is blocked here...

A Night Out...

Last night I had my first night out in Shanghai, with an American chap called Kenny and a few girls who, all of whom met on one of the Shanghai expat websites (I prmised myself I wasn't going to go out of my way to meet foreigners, and the promise lasted over two weeks, so I tried! Unfortunatly the students here just don't have the inclination or spending power to go into town at night, so I really had no choice).

We went to a pub that has an expat mixer event every Wednesday on the top floor and followed it with a salsa bar/club in the French Concession.

Lots of interesting things happened but I'm still digesting the experience, Seigo and Jono are in town for a few days from later today and then Kenny and I and a few others are going out again on Saturday, so expect a longer entry about in near future!