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Published: August 17th 2007
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Tsinghua 1
On a rare clear day - this is in the southeast corner of the university looking towards the Main Building OK, so I'm not writing this at any time near the 6th of July. In fact, it's the 17th of August right now. I've been a little slow in starting this blog. It's intended to be a log of what I do and an account of my impressions of this place between the 3rd of July and the 26th of September, so that friends and family can keep up without having a compulsory deluge of 800-word emails.
Incidentally, a little of the descriptions and so on that appear here may be adapted or coiped directly from emails I've sent to people. It saves time, and in a way is more accurate because I did actually write said emails at around the time the post is dated to. Sorry for being lazy.
Dramatis Personae: Lewys Jones and April Dunham, students at St. Catz doing the same placement as me (but different research projects)
Prof. Andrew Godfrey, graduate of the Oxford Materials Department and organiser of the placement
Dr. Liu Liang, my project supervisor
Finding my feet
Beijing, then. I arrived on the 3rd after a long flight with a changeover at Dubai. These were my first impressions, as far
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The Foreign Students and Further Study dormitories - mine is second from right. as I can remember:
*
Hot and humid, like being in a mist-sprayed greenhouse
* Most things are on an entirely different
scale to what I'm used to. Tsinghua University campus is about the size of the city of Oxford, and occupies a site just outside Beijing's Northwest fourth ringroad. There are six ringroads in total (although the first one only goes around the Forbidden City, so it doesn't count). It's usually about 800m between subway stops, but more for line 13.
*
Polluted and grimy. Visibility is usually below 2km, and as soon as you step off campus, your eyes start stinging.
*
Traffic: both in volume and attitude. There are a lot of bikes and bike trailers. Pedestrians often walk in the road and cars often go onto the pavement. Bus stops are in the cycle lanes. All drivers use their horns instead of the brakes. Priority on the road is given to whoever has the bigger vehicle. Driving is, in a word, selfish.
* The
food is odd. It seems to have less substance than back at home. I had a similar feeling adjusting to food in Japan three years ago, but here the problem is
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The materials department compounded by the food environment, which is "hot and noisy". Not good when you're settling in with jetlag and a delicate stomach.
Wednesday, 4th July Or, as they like to write it here, 2007/7/4. Today we went to start the long process of getting our official Tsinghua student cards from the Foreign Students' Registration Office. We're living in a dorm on the northeastern edge of the campus: building 21. It has 12 floors and about 48 single ensuite rooms per floor above the 1st floor. Oddly for China, the ground floor is number 0: most places follow American numbering here. Actually, the Materials department, where we went first after registering, has its ground floor as no 2. Andy Godfrey, who is the English professor here who manages this placement, works on the seventh floor. The department is building an eighth floor, but hasn't got planning permission yet. Apparently the reasoning is that they'll be able to get permission once it's built.
Andy took us on a tour of the campus, which is, as I said before, huge. Our dorm and the six other buildings in the row like it were built about three years ago, as part
Tsinghua 4
the workbench in my lab of a campus development programme which filled in the northern part starting about seven years ago. The 'Main Building', where many departments are based, was built in the 60s, and the '2nd Gate' and original quad were built or started in 1911 as a result of the Boxer Rebellion (most other Western countries asked for money as an indemnity, the US asked for theirs to pay for a new University in Peking).
The campus is surprisingly green. When the then Prime Minister came for a tour to celebrate the university's 90th anniversary in 2001, he made a comment about there not being many trees around. Cue massive campaign within the university: "Make Tsinghua Greener" had thousands of mature trees planted all around the campus. Now, a few years later, it seems like they've been there for ages. There are also lots of chirpy birds that keep me awake at night. Actually I probably wouldn't have slept anyway, but they annoyed me.
As a result of not having slept the previous night, and generally feeling ropey from the heat and/or jetlag and/or something I caught on the plane, I went to bed after lunch instead of meeting my supervisor.
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The Tsinghua-Foxconn Nanotech Research Center (sic) My room has air conditioning but there's a sign telling me that in the interest of saving power I'm not to set it below 26C. I put it on 20 and slept all afternoon.
When dinner time came, I was longing for real food. We got in a taxi to go to TGI Friday. We showed the driver a map, he said he knew the place and could take us to the restaurant, and then he dropped us too far and it took us 15min walk to find it. Anyway, we got there in the end and had our Western food, remarking how odd it was that the American-themed restaurant should be empty on the 4th of July. The staff were rather sleepy, it was almost as though they didn't want to run promotions and have the place full...
Thursday, 5th July In the morning we sorted out getting a dining card, which enables us to eat at whichever of the two dozen-odd canteens on campus. The one closest to our dorm is a semicircular, four-floored affair with eighteen windows on each floor, lined up against the one straight wall, all serving food independendtly. You prepay on the dining card, then go to a window, point at what you want, sometimes ask for rice, then they input the price and you swipe the card. It's all very easy. In theory.
In the afternoon, Andy took me to see my supervisor, Liuliang, in the Nano buildling (the Tsinghua-Foxconn Nanotechnology Research Center). I was still bleary-eyed and lolling somewhat from jetlag wipeout and heat. Liuliang gave me a run-down of nanotube research history - all sixteen years of it - and then showed me and Andy round the buildling. It's funded by Foxconn, as its name suggests, so it has oodles of foreign money pouring in to pay for people and equipement. As such it's probably the best-equipped department in the university, and probably China. Liuliang then explaned exactly what my project would be while I was here. I asked to borrow some books to do background reading, since I was already feeling academically out of my depth. Thinking it was Friday, I told Liuliang I'd see him on Monday, then took the books back to my dorm and promptly forgot about everything else and went to sleep.
Friday, 6th July Today was mostly a rest day for me, spent in the Materials department with its grey dusty walls, writing emails and checking facebook on the rather sad computer as a way of momentarily plugging the homesickness. I have by this time already spent an unreasonable amount of money on calls home with my UK mobile in the middle of the night (still can't sleep - it doesn't help that dawn is at 5 because there's no DST).
I think I'll describe what breakfast is like here. There's no chance of having anything like cereal and milk. Generally, everything is white: dumplings, eggs, odd tasteless pancakes, thin rice porridge-soup. The dumplings all look the same, and with no way of asking the difference, it's pot luck whether you get pork, pork and onion, pork and cabbage, or weird scrambled egg and pepper. So far our favourite (and most reliably digestible) has been something resembling eggy bread with extra sugar. Lewys has taken a shine to tea-flavoured hard-boiled eggs. I've been finding breakfast hard to take, and went to get something bread-based from the nearby campus supermarket. Bread here is very odd. "Normal" bread tastes like stale brioche - sweet and dry. I tried the raisin buns too, because they were reliable and tasty in Japan, but they had the same problem and definitely not enough raisins. It was very frustrating that only the fruit tasted as I expected it to. However, people tend not to eat fruit at meals here. Apparently fruit is regarded as a snack food. Weird.
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