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Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Of KTV and Missed Trains
Wang Ning is here in China! How exciting to have friends visit :) He arrived Saturday but unfortunately Helen and I were frantically busy with conference preparations; most of Sunday we were busy with the conference, and then being extremely tired and lazy in bed recovering from it all.
However, I was finally free yesterday and Wang Ning and I made an awesome day trip out to Tianjin. We caught a late morning train and arrived in time to try Tianjin's famous goubuli ("dog ignores") baozi (steamed buns) for lunch, as well as some other Tianjin specialties.
Unfortunately, food only amused us for about an hour before we realized that Tianjin is a rather boring place. Solution? KTV for 3.5 hours! Amazingly, all the small rooms were taken - I guess Tianjin people were bored enough to be all karaokeing on a Monday afternoon too - so we had a medium sized room all to ourselves, to sing our favorite Mandarin pop songs.
Then we had dinner...
And then we missed our train.
So we got to spend another very warm and sticky hour and a half in the Tianjin train station listening to loud and obnoxious announcements over the PA system. Train ride back to Beijing, cab ride back to PKU, and thus concluded the day trip. Tiring but enjoyable :)
However, I was finally free yesterday and Wang Ning and I made an awesome day trip out to Tianjin. We caught a late morning train and arrived in time to try Tianjin's famous goubuli ("dog ignores") baozi (steamed buns) for lunch, as well as some other Tianjin specialties.
Unfortunately, food only amused us for about an hour before we realized that Tianjin is a rather boring place. Solution? KTV for 3.5 hours! Amazingly, all the small rooms were taken - I guess Tianjin people were bored enough to be all karaokeing on a Monday afternoon too - so we had a medium sized room all to ourselves, to sing our favorite Mandarin pop songs.
Then we had dinner...
And then we missed our train.
So we got to spend another very warm and sticky hour and a half in the Tianjin train station listening to loud and obnoxious announcements over the PA system. Train ride back to Beijing, cab ride back to PKU, and thus concluded the day trip. Tiring but enjoyable :)
Monday, May 26, 2008
a carefree life once more!
Very happy to report that our conference went off completely successfully -- the room was full, the students were attentive and interested, the speakers were much more thumbs up than not, and there was plenty of congratulations afterward on a job well done. Can't ask for much more than that. Everyone was amazed that we'd pulled it off from idea to actual event in the time span of a month, but what can we say...when you're studying abroad in Beijing, you have a lot of free time.
Now we can once again return to normal, college-student-carefree lives. Well...not exactly, but closer, anyhow.
On Saturday we went on a tour of some hutongs (alleyways), which Beijing is famous for. There used to be over 6000 hutongs in Beijing that, if connected, would reach from Seattle to Washington DC. But now with modernization only about 2000 are left. We did the touristy thing and took rickshaws through some hutongs near Houhai, and then wandered around near the lake for a while. I'd never been during the day before, so it was pretty interesting -- there were lots of Chinese people hanging out by the lake, some swimming, some fishing, blatantly ignoring the "No swimming or fishing" signs behind them.
Walking along the edge as they pave a hutong road
We also saw the Drum and Bell towers in the middle of the city:
Drum Tower
Bell Tower
Walking centipede-like down the extremely steep stairs in the Drum Tower
Now we can once again return to normal, college-student-carefree lives. Well...not exactly, but closer, anyhow.
On Saturday we went on a tour of some hutongs (alleyways), which Beijing is famous for. There used to be over 6000 hutongs in Beijing that, if connected, would reach from Seattle to Washington DC. But now with modernization only about 2000 are left. We did the touristy thing and took rickshaws through some hutongs near Houhai, and then wandered around near the lake for a while. I'd never been during the day before, so it was pretty interesting -- there were lots of Chinese people hanging out by the lake, some swimming, some fishing, blatantly ignoring the "No swimming or fishing" signs behind them.
Walking along the edge as they pave a hutong roadWe also saw the Drum and Bell towers in the middle of the city:
Drum Tower
Bell Tower
Walking centipede-like down the extremely steep stairs in the Drum Tower
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Google's Sichuan People Search
About a day and a half after the earthquake, Google launched a custom search engine allowing people to search for information about their relatives and friends in Sichuan. It crawls different websites and forums so people can find out if those they care about are safe, or otherwise. Within 10 days it had already connected at least 1000 people with their relatives and friends in Sichuan.
Working at Google last summer made me quite the fangirl, so I decided to share the Google love with my Stanford classmates by organizing a trip to the Beijing office. We were missing a few people who decided on the spur of the moment to fly out to Xinjiang, but about 15 of us taxied over to Google on Friday and had a nice little company visit. They told us about Google's business in China and some of their projects, including the aforementioned people search for the Sichuan earthquake.
Working at Google last summer made me quite the fangirl, so I decided to share the Google love with my Stanford classmates by organizing a trip to the Beijing office. We were missing a few people who decided on the spur of the moment to fly out to Xinjiang, but about 15 of us taxied over to Google on Friday and had a nice little company visit. They told us about Google's business in China and some of their projects, including the aforementioned people search for the Sichuan earthquake.
CHINICT
I attended this conference called CHINICT on Thursday. It's a very big tech conference, apparently, with big companies, "rising stars" i.e. hot start-ups, and all manner of other semi-related participants, like venture capitalists and angel investors, and media people. The tickets are supposed to be very expensive but I hear that most people get invited as VIP guests and get in for free. A Tsinghua professor who is a Stanford alum invited me and Helen (though Helen didn't come because of Chinese class); the forwarded invitation letter said:
> You can invite people of your choice to register
> free of charge (VIP pass) to CHINICT 2008. Typical
> profiles of interesting people to invite include key
> executives at large companies, officials,
> entrepreneurs, influencers and media.
Yes, that's us.
The presentations were so-so but it was a good networking opportunity. I saw a few of my entrepreneurially-minded friends who show up at all these events. I guess if you hang around Beijing long enough, you get to know this circle of people pretty well.
> You can invite people of your choice to register
> free of charge (VIP pass) to CHINICT 2008. Typical
> profiles of interesting people to invite include key
> executives at large companies, officials,
> entrepreneurs, influencers and media.
Yes, that's us.
The presentations were so-so but it was a good networking opportunity. I saw a few of my entrepreneurially-minded friends who show up at all these events. I guess if you hang around Beijing long enough, you get to know this circle of people pretty well.
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