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Published: November 20th 2010
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My second week in Wuhan was better. I was reunited with the internet! I had gone about a month without regular contact with friends and family and it was comforting to be connected with the outer world again. Also I after a week of bumming around I really wanted to hit the lab. I was told to wait until our weekly group meeting on Monday afternoon. Then everyone would make introductions and I could get set up with some work to do. Well group meeting time came around and I was completely overwhelmed! Turns out there are 40 people working under this professor - a handful of assistant professors and 30+ grad students. Only 2 of the grad students are girls. Unsurprisingly, the whole meeting took place in very fast Chinese. Also some people had rather thick regional accents. I didn't understand one bit of the meeting. We also had to go around the room and make introductions and I was very embarrassed. In general I felt very shy because I didn't know anyone and also because I didn't know how to act in that situation. I was nervous because I didn't know what behavior is considered weird or annoying and
also I have a harder time perceiving people's reactions to things here.
Well I survived the meeting and everyone disappeared back to their labs and I still didn't have work to do. I asked my officemate if I could start work and she said I should go back and ask Professor Zhan. He said I could go get a tour of all the labs and then choose what I wanted to do. I asked if particular labs actually needed another student or more help and he said no, I could just choose. That evening, one of Professor Zhan's students took a new Ph.D. student and me on a tour of all the labs. Several of the labs were already very developed and I didn't get very clear answers on what their future work and motivations would be. (This should be at least partially blamed on my poor Chinese.) One lab was rather new. They had a 10 meter atom interferometer a few stories underground, which was cool in itself! Also they had just finished construction of the lab and vacuum and laser systems and were just about to work on firing up their MOT and Zeeman slower. Back at
MIT, I hadn't really gone beyond working on vacuum and laser systems, so it seemed like a great time to join the experiment.
For the rest of that week, I spent some time in the lab watching others work. (I question the plan of letting me choose a lab group without regard to which group could actually use another person.) It felt super awesome to have some buddies to eat in the cafeteria with. We had some simple, polite conversations in Chinese and in English. I asked them how to say a lot of things in Chinese and wrote them down in my handy-dandy notebook.
The weekend came and I was determined to force myself out and get more familiar with the city. First, I wanted to get a public transportation card. I asked some random people in the area and eventually got pointed to some random dude sitting on the street selling them from a bag. There is a black market for public transportation cards?? I still don't know where to go to add money. Then I got a haircut, which was a huge event because they were all excited to have a foreigner.
Finally, I
took the bus to the Yellow Crane Tower, one of Wuhan's most famous tourist destinations. The tower was burned down and built back up something like 5 times and also lots of famous poetry was written about it. It was a nice tower I guess, though not worth the 80 RMB entrance ticket. Also I got some "omg! a foreigner! take a picture with us!" which was bothersome. The surrounding park was also nice. That night, I went to a concert at Vox, a bar/club that supposedly has a lot of good punk/electronic/underground/whatever music. Actually that night they had a group of guys maybe in their 20's playing rather classical Chinese music with classical instruments. It was pretty rad! Then I stuck around for the dancing afterwards, hoping to make some friends. Actually a club is maybe a terrible place for one person to make friends. Especially since the gender ratio was maybe 3/4 male, 1/4 female. It was a really awkward night and I now hesitate to go clubbing without a group of friends.
The next day, I hung out with a grad student who wanted to practice his English. We went to the mall because I think
he thought all girls like that. I did like the math and physics section of the bookstore where they had tons of textbooks for 20-50 rmb! I was like a little kid in a candy shop!! I bought Sakurai's Modern Quantum Mechanics for like 5 USD, maybe 1/20 of what it would cost in the U.S.! Finally, after some traffic jams and confusion, I met up with for dinner with Diana and Craig, two Americans who teach English at the Wuhan University of Technology. We "met" because Diana is my mom's former student's sister. It had been a couple of weeks since I had hung out with other Americans and it was an amazing relief to have a fluent English conversation.
So that is my second week in Wuhan! Figuring out what's up, meeting new people, and a whole lotta awkward.
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