Matthew Zimmerman

Beijing: A video interlude on the Great Wall of China

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 14:07:00 EST

I'm a few days behind on my little travelogue through Beijing, but I thought I would skip a few days ahead and post a video I made yesterday walking a (restored) section of the Great Wall at Juyong Pass. (I apparently like to say "ladies and gentlemen" a lot. Apologies.)

Beijing: Day five -- playing hooky at the Summer Palace

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 14:07:00 EST

Wednesday was supposed to be a full day at the conference, but I only made it through the first (8:00-10:00 AM) session before I decided I would be a bad, bad structural genomicist, skip the rest of the day's talks, and spend the day at the Summer Palace.

The Summer Palace is a complex of buildings near a lake in northwest Beijing where the emperor would go to get away from the stresses of life in the Forbidden City (its palatial expanses, its hundreds of concubines, etc.). Apparently the lake itself was pretty small to start with, but apparently 100,000 slave laborers can do quite a bit to expand the size of a lake, and now it's probably better than a kilometer east to west and two north to south. The lake is surrounded by a band of forests and gardens. There's a hill on the north end with a decent-sized Buddhist temple, which is the large building you see in the background of many of these pictures.

We started along the lake on the eastern side, and walked south along the paved shoreline. There were many tourists around, but despite the bustle of people, the place felt noticeably more peaceful than the rest of Beijing. I heard birds chirping, and felt a constant cool breeze blowing across the water. There were several benches along the sidewalk, on which many tourists were resting, watching the water.

About halfway south in the lake, there is a small island, connected to the shore by an ornate, 17-arch bridge, which is creatively named "The Seventeen Arch Bridge". There are hundreds of small carved lions along the bridge along the railings of the bridge, each one in a different pose.

We walked over to the island, and toured the small pavilions that were there, then took a ferry to the from the island to the hill in the north. When we got off the ferry, the crowds were considerably larger. Clearly the complex around the temple is the most popular draw in the Summer Palace park. We started to work our way up the hill, which is surprisingly steep. Along the way, we passed a building called the "Walking through a Rice Paper Painting" pavilion (the Chinese have such wonderful names for their buildings). This building was integrated into the rock of the hillside and had positively beautiful architecture.

We reached the peak of the hillside, and I made sure I got the requisite "King of the Mountain" picture.

We then went down into the temple proper. The temple itself is a circular building in a small square courtyard with narrow shutters. Within the building itself there is a single large chamber with a 10-foot-tall golden Buddha statue with many arms. I don't have a picture of the statue, or of any other Buddha statues on this trip for that matter, because most of the temples have a policy forbidding photography within the buildings themselves. The building from the outside, however, is pretty impressive.

What's even more impressive is the view from the temple. Not only can you see the whole lake in a panoramic view, you can also see the city rising behind the trees ringing the park.

We went back down from the top of the hill, and before we headed back to the hotel, wandered around the back of the hillside to a place called Suzhou Street. In the days of the Ming dynasty, this canal-side street was a marketplace, and was recently restored. Of course, what better way to simulate a Ming dynasty marketplace than to pack each stall with souvenier shops and pushy sellers in period clothes? Add to that the fact that the sidewalk between the stalls and the canal was so narrow that signs asked that people walk along the circuit in a single direction, and what you had was less of a historical display and more of a gauntlet.

Having run the Suzhou gauntlet more or less unscathed (the one fragment of Mandarin I know best means "No, I don't want to buy anything"), we caught a bus back to the hotel in time for the conference banquet. We had quite a large, impressive Chinese-style meal (I'll talk more about food in China in the next post). I personally ate way too much and passed out shortly thereafter.

Beijing: the first day

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 14:07:00 EST

We left from Newark about 1:00 PM EDT, to fly non-stop to Beijing. If you looked at the standard Mercator projection of the Earth they showed on the monitors on the plane, our path to Beijing was a very confusing one. The route looked like a very big upside-down U, as we were due to fly due north over Greenland, travel halfway east-west across the world, and then fly due south over Siberia and Mongolia. Not until we got halfway and the map changed to a polar projection (e.g., the North Pole was at the center with the longitude lines projecting radially) did I figure out what was going on. The east coast and Beijing are almost exactly on opposite sides of the planet, and the shortest path was a straight line[1] more or less over the North Pole. In case you are wondering, pretty much everything north of Canada and Siberia is a featureless white sheet of ice and snow.

There were about 12 different channels, each running about 2.5 hours of TV programming on a repeating loop. After I watched the 2 channels I was marginally interested in (X-Men III and three episodes of House), I still had nine hours to burn. I watched as many episodes of Veronica Mars as my laptop batteries would allow (not that many). One might have thought that if I was going to take a thirteen hour flight to a place with a twelve-hour time difference, sleeping on the plane would have been wise, but I couldn't, no matter how much I tried. The longer the flight went, the more I had to get out of my window seat and bother the nice elderly couple between me and the aisle. By the time I got to Beijing, I was pretty much exhausted, my brain thinking it's 1 AM but my eyes telling me it's 1 PM.

When I first starting thinking what Beijing would be like, I figured that it would be a truly alien place. Chinese culture, like its language, must be so far different from what I am used to that I wouldn't even be able to process it. Well, I think I was wrong. The Beijing airport is pretty much like any other airport I've ever been in. The taxi ride from the airport was very much the same. Apart from the fact that Beijing taxi drivers drive like lunatics and that the road signs were in gibberish[2], the ride from the airport would have been indistinguishable from a taxi ride from, say, Washington Dulles.

After a surprisingly long taxi ride, we arrived at our hotel. The hotel is a multi-building complex, and of course we weren't staying in the fancy main building, but the student building next door. We checked into our room at about 5:00 PM local time, and despite the fact that I should have tried to stay up later to get over my jet lag, I was unconscious within about 10 minutes.

[1] Yes, I know it's not really a straight line. Don't email me.

[2] To only my eyes, obviously.

Beijing: Days three and four -- meetings and bite-sized beef ribs

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 14:07:00 EST

My Monday and Tuesday were primarily spent in the meeting hall. The ICSG 2006 meeting usually has talks all day from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, with a two hour break for lunch and poster viewing. I'm not going to describe the meeting itself, on the thought that most of you out there reading this probably aren't interested. The few of you that are I'll tell you about it in person. I will say that my advisor Wladek Minor gave a pretty good presentation on Monday afternoon. There were a few technical issues with projectors and laptop power management to be worked out, but his talk went on without a hitch.

More or less, I think I've switched over to Beijing time. I still get pretty sleepy about 9:30 - 10:00 PM, and find myself waking up at 5:00 AM (those of you doing the math on my blog posting times will note that I'm posting these pretty early in the morning over here). But I'm no longer passing out from exhaustion in the middle of the afternoon. Unfortunately, I think I've adapted enough that I'm going to have to do it again when I get back to Charlottesville.

We are on our own for dinner most nights. On Monday night, I wandered by foot around the district where our hotel is located. There are a lot of restaurants and for some reason late-night hairstyling salons. I also saw some people playing pickup badminton in the street. I ending up going into a Chinese fast-food place called "Kung-Fu" (their logo included a cartoon representation of Bruce Lee) and ordering some sort of beef ribs meal. It included some bite-sized pieces of beef ribs, but for reasons I don't understand, every piece had a chunk of bone in it. I had two or three pieces and then gave up. Thank God a big bowl of rice came with the meal.

The next night my dinner primarily consisted of Oreos.

Beijing: Jet lag takes its toll

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 10:30:00 EST

To skip forward in time a little bit: I spent most of the day Sunday, 29 Oct, waiting in line in the Beijing Airport, and left at 5:00 PM (Beijing time) on the transcontinental flight to Newark. Due to the wonders of the International Date Line and the odd coincidence of the end of Daylight Savings time, in local time, my flight landed about 35 minutes after it took off. (Funny, it felt longer than that.)

I had a long layover (twelve hours) last night in Newark, and booked a hotel room for the night on the hope that I would sleep. Curiously, I could not, which was not my experience on the way out. So now, as I write this, I'm waiting in the Washington Dulles airport for my final flight, having slept about 5 hours in the last 40, give or take. We're now working our way into the late evening Beijing time, and by the time I get off the plane in Charlottesville, I'm afraid that (1) I'm probably not going to stay awake long and (2) switching back to EST might be harder than the switch to Beijing time.

The point of this little rant is to apologize for and to explain the lack of recent updates. I still have three days of travelogue left to fill in, and I took lots of pictures and notes. So don't worry, those posts are forthcoming; it just may take a couple of days. Personally, I blame the non-Euclidean geometry of the planet.