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| I had a great time teaching in Beijing - the students really seemed interested in what I had to say. | Like I was saying, the students hung on my every word - like when we took a class trip to the free trade zone in Tainan and were supposed to dress in "business casual" clothing. Rob (center, with hat) claims he's from Berkeley, but I think his attire only counts as business casual if you're on a ranch in Texas... |
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| Aside from the classroom (above), campus was very nice. Right across from our on-campus hotel was part of the old imperial gardens. The scenery (with a lake, bridges, and a gazebo) was so nice that artists come to paint it. (It looks even nicer without the digitization...) There's even a waterfall on campus! It's a very large campus, so we all had to buy bikes to get around. | This is the "must-have" photo at Tsinghua University - in front of the original university gate. We were on campus during graduation week, and the crowds here (in the middle of a major road leading to the classroom) almost caused us several bike accidents. | The campus canteens are pretty good (and very cheap - 50 or 75 cents per meal), but Qingqing (their fake McDonald's) is NOT. |
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| Look out, Lance Armstrong! Here we are ready to set off on the Tour de Beijing. Kim leads the pack, while I'm in the back right of the photo next to Jorge, the race leader. (At least, he's wearing the yellow jersey.) Actually, campus was so big that we had to bike from our hotel to the classroom every morning! At the left of the photo is a campus security guard; under his watchful eye, "only" several bikes were stolen the first week. I hadn't ridden a bike in at least a decade and a half, so I preferred Mindy's suggestion that Georgia Tech buy us all Segways. | Here I am playing basketball against some Tsinghua students. I'm on the left, out of focus (look, coach - I'm moving without the basketball), while Preston (right) looks to line up his shot. In simulation terms, I was probably a PGFFEF player. | This time I am in focus, but for a bad reason. Our team (me, Jason, Preston, and Megan) lost our last game, so we're waiting on the sidelines for our next chance to play. |
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| The Great Wall. I've wanted to see this for a long time, and it didn't disappoint. Wow. These pictures don't come close to doing it justice. The wall here stretches on and on and on... you really get a sense of how big it was, especially compared to the surroundings. | Okay, it disappointed a little the first time we went there (the day after my birthday, in fact). It looks impressive with all these penants, but too European and too touristy. | Oh yeah, did I say too touristy? Yikes! Joe didn't seem to like it either. I'm glad it was so crowded, though - because of that, a bunch of us decided to come back to a different part of the wall two days later and take a 6-mile hike on it. |
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| Since it's not a touristy part, the wall is unrestored - so much of our hike was on sections like this... | ...or like this... | ...or even like this. Still, even broken and overgrown and eroded, it's incredibly impressive. |
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| The view from the wall is very nice once you start hiking away from civilization. | Here's the view on the Mongol side of the wall. | The wall is so strong-looking that we (Megan, Edmund, me, Joe, and Jose) felt confident in turning our back to the Mongol hordes long enough to take this picture. |
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| Back at the touristy section, here we all are at the "end" (as far as they let you climb). | Here are all the girls in the class (if you look closely enough, you can see me in the background talking to Pharaon while this picture was being taken)... | ...and all the guys, plus me wearing Jason's rice-paddy hat. Side note - this was a very long, fun, and interesting day. We got up around 5 AM to catch the bus to the wall, when we got back I had just enough time to shower and then take a cab across Beijing to the synagogue (called the "sino-gogue") for Friday evening services, and when I got back from there I got snagged into going back out with everyone; I didn't get back until after 4, and didn't get to sleep until about 5 (after sunrise in this part of one-time-zone China). |
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| The Great Wall... a nice place to lie down and relax - just ask Preston. | Yep. Just catchin' some rays on the wall... | ...until the Wall Police showed up and yelled at us. He also snagged Sumir and Rob for climbing past the "do not climb beyond this point" sign - but instead of subjecting us to Chinese water torture, he agreed to let them pose with him for a picture. (Actually, we got lots of requests from random Chinese people who wanted to pose with us... mostly it was the blonde, blue-eyed (and female) students, but even I got one or two.) |
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| Near the end of the 6-mile hike was a bridge over a really nice gorge. | It wasn't all bridges and lounging though - a lot of the climb was very steep. No, this isn't a camera trick - it really is this steep. | Like everywhere else I went in China, there were lots of people selling shoddy, overpriced merchandise. Megan's shirt - "I 'glimbed' the Great Wall" - really says it all. |
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| Wow. This place is really impressive. There's a Chinese saying, something like "you're a girly man unless you've been to the Great Wall." (Roughly translated...) I don't know if that's true, but I'm certainly glad I got the chance to see it. | |
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| Tienanmen Square. This gate really is as big as it looks. | The whole group at Tienanmen. | Zee, Jason, and Edmund just lion around with the professor. (Groan...) |
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| There are no (overt) memorials to the students who died at Tienanmen Square, just this tribute-to-the-communist-worker statue. | However, the influence of the students is certainly seen and felt here. Capitalism is alive and well in the square - in addition to the carts selling stuff, there are dozens of people (some pictured) walking around selling (shoddy, overpriced) tourist merchandise to all the visitors. Mao (background) might not be too happy... | While at Tienanmen, we viewed Mao's body. The Chinese consider sandals and flip-flops to be disrespectful, so we had to take turns - first all of us with acceptable footwear went through, and then we came out and traded shoes with the sandal-wearers so they could see Mao too. Whaddaya think - do Andy's sandals make my outfit or what? Also modeling exquisite footwear are Pharaon, Kristin, Preston, Erin, Darragh, and Megan. |
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| Back in my usual sneakers, here are the three of us who were supposed to be in charge - me, Prof. Chen Zhou, and Zhu Ying (the study abroad graduate assistant). Unfortunately for Chen and Ying, since they're both fluent in Mandarin and I can only say "hello", "thank you", "west gate", "water", and "chicken", they got stuck with all the work and I got to go have fun. | After Tienanmen, we walked north to the Forbidden Palace. It started to rain, and I discovered that I really need to get a new umbrella. (As you can see, whoever took this picture discovered the same thing...) | I eventually gave up on the umbrella and bought a poncho. If the sandals weren't chic enough, how do we all (Ben, Jorge, Katherine, Preston, Erin, and me in the back; Kim in front) look now? |
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| You're supposed to rub both ends of this animal for good luck. I guess it's better than doing the same to a live one. | After all that, we went out to lunch. We were in Beijing, so what better place to try Peking duck? This guy was a professional slicer, but it doesn't come across too well on camera. |
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| Adjacent to the campus was an old palace that was destroyed by English and French troops when they were putting down a rebellion in colonial days. This is what it looked like before destruction... | ...and this is after. | What palace would be complete without its own human-sized maze? |
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| It felt like it was about 100 degrees (and very humid) at the palace, but under here it was very comfortable. I think we need one of these at Georgia Tech. | I'm in ruins! (Groan, part two...) | We're all in ruins. From front to back (and left to right), the whole class: Megan, Niraj, Kim, Dara, Jorge, Zee; Kristin, Priya, Ying; Me, Pharaon, Darragh, Parul, Neelima, Erin, Paul, Mindy, Monica, Mike, Edmund, Prof. Lu (Asian history professor); Ben, Joe, Jose, George; Andy, Jason, Weijia, David, Bobby, Preston, Katherine, Stephen, Sean, Peng, Sumir; and up on top, Rob. |
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| We stopped at a beach (at a reservoir) on the way back from the Great Wall. We weren't in a great mood, because the bus driver had forced us to stop at a pearl store and a jade store on the way back. I guess that's why the bus trip was so cheap to begin with - he made his money on kickbacks from these stores. Still, in a way it was better than the bus trip to the second part of the wall, when the driver stopped at a roadside fruit stand to buy some black-market cigarettes. Oh, and then he picked up someone we thought was a hitchhiker, but it turned out she was his assistant. It was a very odd trip, but well worth it. | This island in the middle of the reservoir is actually some sort of amusement park. |
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| One of my favorite parts of the trip was reading the English signs. I can't really complain - it's nice of them to have any English at all - but they were very funny. Here's Kristin giving her thumbs-up to my favorite sign ("Please don't letter up") - actually, it's tied for my favorite with the sign for a convenience store called "numeric laser water". By the way, if you're wondering about "grammar rodeo", it's a Simpson's reference - think spelling bee. | I'm not really sure what this "domestic animal slaughter kiosk" sign was referring to, but I hope it's not what it sounds like! | Another good one, but not quite as good as the other two. |
(If you have any other good photos - good scenery, biking around campus, candids at the club, us hanging out somewhere, me sleeping on the hotel floor, etc. - please send them to me.)
A short stop in Taipei