The Collaboration Happy Bus of International Prosperity

About half of my funding this summer is coming from an NSF fellowship along the lines of a science project and research report. The program required me to go to Beijing a few weeks back to meet the other fellows (grantees?), take a goodwill tour of the city, and sit through what seemed like a dozen lectures on China's growing research infrastructure. And I actually had a lot of fun which was all the more unusual since I was hanging out with a bunch of Americans.
All the problems in Shanghai seem like they're multiplied in Beijing. The traffic's gnarlier with work crews, earth movers, jaywalkers and jaydrivers. There are fewer metro cars with more people packed onto them and the stations have enough crowd control barriers that it feels like navigating an ant farm. All the surfaces seem coated with grit; the air is dustier and by the end of the week I was waking up with asthma problems. Despite what I thought earlier about the construction, July 11 is the official cutoff date according to an architect friend-of-a-friend and until then crews are working nonstop.
This was all a source of pride to the government reps who greeted us the morning after our arrival. We had been bussed to a panel at seven-thirty, with most of us not getting breakfast, to attend a series of presentations where every other powerpoint slide was an exponential curve to demonstrate China's exponential-ness. I was getting edgy though and snuck out near the beginning of the third talk. It had been a few days since my last Lexapro and I needed some vodka and razor blades.
I didn't find either though I did come across a short-order place where I bought an entire basket of dumplings for four kuai, like fifty-six cents. By the time I made it back to the lecture hall the last talk was wrapping up and half the attendees were rolling their heads around on their desks.

I could have fed the entire contingent for six bucks but we were about to head back to the cafeteria at base camp anyway. We were staying on the campus of the Chinese University of Mining Technology located in the northwest of the city. Our hotel was labeled as a cultural exchange center and other than our group I noticed a few American students there, some of whom could have been teenagers. The accommodations were decent enough with each of us assigned to separate rooms that had multiple beds. The concrete floors were covered with a thin municipal building sort of red carpet and while the beds were hard and uncomfortable we were so exhausted each evening that falling asleep wasn't a problem. A long-banged fuwuyuan was stationed at the end of the hallway to attend to our needs provided we look up the appropriate words in our pocket dictionaries.

The niftiest feature of my hotel room was that switching on the main power required inserting a dongle on the room key into a breaker slot. There was also a console built into the bedside table that controlled the AC and room lights. Supposedly no hot water was available between 10 and 5 in the afternoon though I didn't really notice if that was true. My room overlooked a chunk of campus that was unremarkable and occasionally traversed by clusters of students in their graduation gowns.

I know I'm in the habit of hating on Americans but this fellowship turned out a fine group of Yanks. The metiers weren't skewed towards engineering either-- there were linguists, geologists, a couple evolutionary biologists and a bona fide paleontologist. Within the first day or so the so-called 'dynamic' had set in. A tall, charismatic Indian mechanical engineer (I have actually met mechanical engineers who don't fit this description) revealed his past travels of the area and became the defacto student body rep (though officially this title belonged to the entomologist). He wore a different club t-shirt each day of the week and had the most exquisite eyelashes I've recalled seeing on a man.

There was a six-foot-four narrow-faced vegetarian whose studies had taken him to Iowa State, though for what I remain uncertain. The only things I know about my home state university are its condensed matter program and its prohibition of alcohol. The tall vegetarian enjoyed frisbee, knew how to juggle, and took special care to place his go stones in the proper manner between the middle and index fingers. His t-shirt proclaimed the 10th anniversary of the Onion Creek Cloggers' Festival.

For on the spot translation we relied on a USC ABC woman to communicate with clerks and a Princeton Hong Kong native to read menus. The chatty SoCal linguist and Jane Austen fan was fluent in Mandarin but couldn't read it, while the more subdued atmospheric scientist and Pink Floyd aficionado could read thousands of characters but spoke only Cantonese.

Only time prevents me from going into more detail of the personalities involved in the contingent. It was really such a full week that I knew would take several posts to recount, so if you check back later there will be more to come.