![\"\"](\"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/01\/beijing-bicycle-park.jpg\" "\\"beijing-bicycle-park\\"")
<\/a>I went to Beijing for a week for a conference (on Computer Simulations of Radiation Effects in Solids — COSIRES) and then to Australia for a week as well to visit a colleague there.\u00a0 I’ll write a second post on Australia; first, Beijing.<\/p>\nSo, I went to Beijing for a scientific conference, so most of the week was spent working (listening to talks and giving a few myself) so I didn’t see as much of China as I would have liked.\u00a0 I left the US on a Friday and arrived in Beijing on Saturday.\u00a0 I went with a postdoc that is working with me who is from China, and his father — along with a few of his friends — picked us up.\u00a0 They drove us around Tiananmen Square and then took us to dinner, where I had the first of several Peking Ducks for the week.\u00a0 Part of the meal also included duck heart (which I neglected to try) and what was Mao’s favorite dish, pork braised in brown sauce.\u00a0 In reality, it seemed like pork fat, so I only tried a small piece.\u00a0 This was probably the oddest thing I tried while in China, including the frog we ate the next day.<\/p>\n
I wanted to buy a couple of souvenirs for friends and family and so the next day we went to a shopping mall, a bit far from our hotel (well, we had to take a taxi to get there, so it wasn’t within walking distance is all I really know).\u00a0 It was pretty push, very upscale.\u00a0 I was looking for a small piece of jade for my daughter, nothing very fancy.\u00a0 So, we looked at the various displays from seemingly different companies.\u00a0 We settled on one eventually, looking at the various pieces.\u00a0 Immediately, the prices jumped out at me.\u00a0 I was looking for a simple piece, a piece shaped like a donut and not much bigger than a quarter.\u00a0 The cheapest piece like this was maybe $500, though most were at least $1000 and some as high as $10,000 or more.\u00a0 The price of a car!\u00a0 With the help of my postdoc’s dad, the lady behind the counter searched in a bin she had underneath and found, eventually, after a bit of searching, a piece that was about $100.\u00a0 The whole store was like this, filled with luxury goods such as watches and perfumes that I couldn’t imagine buying.\u00a0 I quickly realized that China is actually a very capitalistic society, regardless of the form of government it has.\u00a0 It was also clear that there must be a huge disparity between those who have and those who do not, as the average farmer from the country-side likely couldn’t afford the $100 piece I’d just purchased, much less the other pieces that were clearly out of my reach.<\/p>\n
After that, the rest of our week was spent attending the conference, which was, overall, quite good.\u00a0 These conferences are primarily an opportunity to meet with colleagues and collaborators from around the world on a semi-regular basis, to get an update on what they are working on, and to potentially establish new collaborations.\u00a0 As I go to more and more of these, and I see the same people each time, I enjoy them more and more.\u00a0 Each night was spent in the hotel bar, which had a pool table.\u00a0 We stayed until the wee hours of the night, drinking beers and challenging each other to games of pool, usually broken up by country (the Yanks vs the Brits, the Finns vs the Yanks, and so on).\u00a0 We then had to get up betw The conference was held at Beihang University, which was a pretty big campus.\u00a0 It was odd in that there were lots of younger kids also on campus, playing ball and such on the fields.\u00a0 The most memorable part to me was the bicycle parking lot, as this epitomized everything you hear about China.\u00a0 While there are a lot of cars on the road (and it is amazing to me that there aren’t accidents every block), there are still a lot of bikes on the road.\u00a0 They dodge and weave amongst the cars, seemingly taking their lives in their hands with every turn.<\/p>\n The last day of the week, Friday, the conference ended after half a day and some of us decided to go to the Forbidden City.\u00a0 Now, this was impressive.\u00a0 The City is immense and no photo can do it justice.\u00a0 We spent the afternoon just traversing from one end to the other, checking out the various side buildings and gardens and such.\u00a0 But, there were so many buildings, so many parts to the City.\u00a0 My understanding is that the City was built to house the Emperor and his 1000 concubines.\u00a0 The only other men allowed were eunics, to ensure that the concubines were not sullied by any man besides the Emperor.\u00a0 Anyways, the buildings were being refinished, prettied-up, so to speak.\u00a0 It made it feel a bit more like a tourist trap, like it was being Disneyfied just a bit.\u00a0 Even so, it was still such an amazing place.\u00a0 Amazing that such a place could be built for one man.<\/p>\n The next day, I flew to Australia.\u00a0 But, I will write about that another day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been a bit quiet around here lately, primarily due to life and work getting in the way.\u00a0 Work has included a couple of trips in the last few months which have made posting on the blog a bit difficult, trips to China, Australia, and Boston.\u00a0 I meant to post my thoughts on my Eastern … Continue reading Eastern Travels, Part I<\/span> <\/a>een 6 and 7 the next morning to make the next round of talks.\u00a0 This got harder and harder as the week went on.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<\/a>As with most of these conferences, there was an outing.\u00a0 And, in China, there is no bigger draw than the Great Wall.\u00a0 We spent a couple of hours there (once you catch a bus at noon to get there, spend nearly 2 hours on the road to the Great Wall, and then have to be back for dinner, it doesn’t leave a lot of time).\u00a0 We all scattered our separate ways, exploring the Wall in our own ways.\u00a0 I went off with my postdoc, just hiking as far as we could in our 2 hours.\u00a0 We hiked up about 45 minutes, pushing ourselves a bit (which, in my case, isn’t saying a whole lot since I’m not in the best of shape).\u00a0 It was a spectacular view.\u00a0 But, it was also amazing how crowded the whole thing was.\u00a0 Some places, the pathway was only one person wide, but two rows of people were trying to push past one another.\u00a0 And they weren’t polite about it.\u00a0 It was still amazing, however, to think about the effort that went into building the Wall, and how many people died during its construction.\u00a0 Supposedly, when someone died, they just tossed the body over the side and kept working.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n