Sunday, August 2, 2009

8/3/2009

It's the last week of the program, and I definitely haven't updated enough... :(

Things here are really winding down after the poster session, which involved a crazy videochat with Notre Dame... it was actually pretty cool, to be able to exchange our research with people literally on the other side of the earth! I wish that we were allowed more time to present though, because 5 minutes from our side was just too short to detail the projects of the people who presented. I wonder what it'll be like next year, if the program gets any bigger...

In other news, yesterday was a pretty eventful day. I took my grad student and our group, and Professor Zhou out to lunch at the sit-down restaurant in Wan Ren. At one point, there was a pretty interesting conversation about who in the lab could swim. Apparently, Prof. Zhou can't swim, but in his own words, can float for about 10 minutes.

After lunch, I went with John and Brenden's brother to the Hong Qiao pearl market. It was actually really fun - I usually don't even try to get a good deal when bargaining, mainly cause I don't really mind paying extra and/or have a bad idea of how much things should cost, but this is one thing that John is exceedingly good at. He just walks into there, names his price, they say no, he says no... he ends up walking out 15 seconds later with what he wants. Haha. I'll have to take some tips from him.

We then went to Wang Fu Jin, which is the crazy street where they sell scorpions on a stick to eat! John had some, but I stuck with the tried and true lamb skewers. When we went, it was already nighttime, but it looked so cool! There were so many bright lights and big buildings... that's one thing I love about Beijing: everytime you get off a subway station, it's literally like you're in a completely different place...

I can't believe that my time in China is coming to an end so quickly... after the program, I'm going to visit my grandparents and relatives in my hometown, Nanjing, for 3 days. I was a little slow on buying the train tickets to get there, so I ended up with the super cushy but expensive (520 RMB) soft sleeper tickets to there and back.

Anyways, I think I'll have to go back and detail some of the stuff I did earlier on in the program, now that I have time...