Blogs from Changping, Beijing, China, Asia - page 3

April 4, 2010 Today we (Danbo, Sun and I) went to The Forbidden City and to Tiananmen Square. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Wikipedia has an extensive entry on “The Forbidden City”. Here are some fun facts about the Forbidden City: 1. The Forbidden City occupies 720,000 square meters (7,747,200 square feet / 180 acres). The Topkapi Palace in Istanbul measures 700,000 square meters; the Vatican measures 440,000 square meters; and the Kremlin measures 275,000 square meters. 2. There are 9,999 rooms in this series of exquisite palaces inside the City. Nine is a lucky number for the Chinese. (Some books quote 8886 rooms — but this does not include antechambers.) 3. The walls are 32 feet high (10 meters). The surrounding drainage moat is 165 feet wide (50 meters). The main part of ... read more

April 2, 2010 It’s Friday. We’ve had a great week in the lab. All the chemists. . .Wei, Shun, Huang, Zhang, Zhang (there are two Zhang’s!), Dou, and Sun have been putting in crazy hours. . .working all the way through the night some days! They are truly doing an amazing job and I’m enjoying working with them immensely. I’m learning a lot as well. I’ve never done process chemistry before, so this has been such an interesting experience for me. Also, now that we are getting to know each other better we are able to laugh and joke together while we work. I told them about this travel blog I’ve been writing and they all wanted to check out the site so I gave them the web address. I’m sure they must think I am ... read more

Wednesday March 31, 2010 This morning I got very good news from my lab back in San Diego. A project I’ve been working on for six months just produced the results for which we were hoping. I actually had to fight back tears when I read the news from one of my colleagues. . .our research team has put in so many long hours (12. . .sometimes 15 hours days, month after month after month), working on weekends, missing meals and precious, precious sleep. But it was all worth it. What a great way to start out the day! The work here is also going really well. We were able solve some big problems today. I feel very confident that this endeavor is going to be productive and successful. Plus there is the added benefit that ... read more

Forrest Gump famously said that his mother told him life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. The same can be said of Chinese toilets. Once you get your head around the fact that the majority of Chinese toilet visits are not going to be a pleasant experience, it becomes a bit of an adventure. Just HOW bad is the toilet that the bus stops at on the side of a highway at 4am in the morning ACTUALLY going to be? Approached with a large sense of trepidation, a lungful of air from outside, clutching your own packet of tissues with trouser legs pre-rolled to knee level, some toilets have truely surprised me. In the oddest of places where you expect the grimmest of the grim, one can find a ... read more

It’s difficult to talk about the environment in China and not feel completely worried about how on earth anyone could possibly sort this mess out. What stands out the most to the outside observer is that the land, this country, is here for the benefit of man. It’s as simple as that, or so it would seem. The Chinese have been shaping and controlling the environment here, in often ingenious and creative ways, for eons, but nonetheless it has been bent and buckled and stretched and swamped, drained and flooded, mined and filled in, and we only need to see Michael Jacksons face (RIP) to see what happens when one goes too far in trying to fix what wasn’t broken in the first place. Eventually it caves in, bits drop off that weren’t meant too and ... read more