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Published: January 17th 2011
Our lab group took a trip to Hangzhou to go to a conference on atom interferometry for gravitational wave detection. Hangzhou is in Zhejiang province and the conference took place at Zhejiang University. We took a sleeper train there and played some cards on the way. Hangzhou is supposedly famous for it's beautiful scenery, especially around the West Lake area. We all gave it a "meh, looks like Wuhan's East Lake." There is a famous story about a beautiful girl who falls in love with a snake and then stuff happens and they finally meet on a bridge between their two worlds or something. So we saw the famous bridge, which I also give a "meh." The physics conference had some pretty good presentations and they were actually in English, which was a real treat for me! The conference was "international" which meant that there were like 50 Chinese physicists, maybe 4 Americans, and 2 Italians. There was also a nearby hill that our lab group climbed together which gave us some good views of the city and the West Lake.
One of my labmates was quite starstruck by the postdoc who was there representing the Kasevich group from Stanford
and he was quite shy and kept trying to get me to get him to hang out with us. : ) I actually did occasionally help with some translation between the Chinese and American/European physicists, not because my language abilities are superb, but because sometimes the Chinese people left the white people out of the loop and also some of my labmates aren't so used to listening to simple but fast colloquial English like "what are you guys up to tonight?" So funny enough, I actually was not shitting the CLS people when I blabbed in my application about how studying Chinese would help me (in the smallest way) foster international cooperation in the physical sciences.
We spent a great proportion of our time there playing! This seems to be a trend for such meetings. The highlight was going to the Song Dynasty town which is a fake town that is supposed to be in the style of the Song Dynasty. There we saw an in tense MULTIMEDIA EXTRAVAGANZA titled "Romance of the Song Dynasty." There were mad lasers and smoke machines and pyrotechnics and the front rows of the audience actually moved in and out during the show.
Yang Wei!
Always striking a pose.It was completely overstimulating. I recall last summer we learned that in Chinese there is not a word for "tacky." They acted out some ancient love stories including the local snake-girl one.
Another day we went to the Xixi Wetlands. It was raining that day. We were wet. The lands were wet. Hm nothing so special, but we toured around in a boat and walked on some boardwalks and well it was cool to go to a wetland.
Mostly I enjoyed the chance to spend some time hanging out with my labmates. Despite the fact that in 1.5 months I had done absolutely nothing useful for the experiment (another trend that would continue...), they were becoming my friends. By then I had kind of learned how to use Chinese to be friendly and make really stupid jokes.
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