A Home Depot Day

Some engineering requires a trip to Home Depot. During my first so many weeks
here I have needed a Home Depot many times but every time I describe the store I get
told there isn't one in Beijing. I had this grand plan to introduce Home Depot to China but it turns out all I needed to do was to ask Peter... as the B&Q is just like Home Depot and I pass it every day! I actually had asked what the store was and been told it was a furniture store by numerous people but I should have just gone inside.
We went to B&Q to get some supplies. They sold some things we didn't even know what they were! Furniture inhibitor? We bought the wood and foam that we needed and asked to have it delivered but there is a truck ban at the moment in Beijing as they are trying to cut back on emissions to lower the air pollutants. So we couldn't have a truck deliver it. They were very nice though and said we could pay a deposit and borrow shopping carts so we took off down the street. We hadn't gotten very far when this motorized cart stopped and said for $3 the driver would deliver it. Deal! Peter got a nice ride out of it too!

We had to have some glass work done too so we went in search of a glass cutter. Luckily Peter and Xue knew how to find one. I don't know if I'd be able to find one in America! For $7 we had a window cut for us! Unfortunately the window was broken in the process but we had a guarantee that if the window was broken we'd get a new one for free. The window cutting man wasn't very happy though so he smashed the broken window all over the ground so Xue and I then had the fun task of cleaning it up....

SPR

After a nice morning visit to Fedex to send Professor Wysocki a nice present, Xue and I found a quiet coffee shop to work in, SPR coffee, that had free wireless. It was fantastic! Do you think SPR stands for Starbucks of the People's Republic? Iced Peanuts anyone? - anna

Practicing English

I needed to get some plastic sheeting for work (I swear we work really hard here!) so Xue and I ventured to the local market. While Xue was busy helping to cut the plastic sheeting, the children of the stall owner were busy talking to me. They were so interested in me because I was a foreigner and kept asking me where I was from in Chinese. I kept having to ask Xue to translate for me. Their mother kept telling them to practice their English with me. All they could say was "hello" and "thank you" and "bye bye" so they kept saying it over and over again. They wanted me to take their photo so they could see themselves in the camera. It was all very cute and they didn't want me to leave! -anna

The Great Wall

You never know who might show up in Beijing.... of all the people to happen to be in Beijing this summer, I never expected I would get a visit from my good friend Stace!
Dr. Stace Beaulieu is a deep sea biologist (and I mean deep) at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Stace and I did a lot of field work together when I was in graduate school as we spent 2 months as cabin mates together in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (where she would make me lattes when we worked the 12-4 am shift) and did quite a bit of scuba diving together... oh and we drank a lot of coffee together while I was a graduate student. Stace came by Beijing on her way to a conference and she signed us up to do a 10 km Great Wall hike. Most tourists who venture to the Great Wall visit an area called Badaling which is close to Beijing and is a restored section of the wall. Instead we ventured further to hike from Jinshanling to Simatai in an unrestored section.


We saw very few tourists during our day. Stace and I had a guide, Kung Fu Bruce, who hiked with us the whole time. He told us about all of his adventures hiking in China and about the Great Wall and even gave Stace some spicy tofu to eat. The hike was harder than I had imagined as the steps were so steep in places but the scenery was incredible and it was really nice to be outside of the city. It was lightly raining on and off all day. It started to downpour at the end and luckily not before otherwise it would have been really scary. Kung Fu Bruce told us he was hiking with a group of middle school students this past winter and it started to snow! I never imagined I would have the opportunity in my life to hike the Great Wall of China! I hope you enjoy these photos as much as I did the hike. -anna

Professor Frank Tittel Comes to Visit

Professor Frank Tittel from Rice University came to visit us in Beijing. He is Rafal's advisor and therefore was excited to see what Rafal had been busy working on. Professor Tittel also got to meet new members of the MIRTHE team, like incoming graduate student Xue. We ventured into the heart of Beijing for dinner, passing Tiananmen Square. Luckily we had time for a quick latte at Starbucks! Professor Tittel gave a talk at IAP during his stay with us. He was also very happy to find that they were selling plastic bucky balls at the Forbidden City so he bought one to give to the Nobel Prize winner who discovered bucky balls!

MIRTHE in Beijing Photos

Here are some photos of our group with our IAP collaborators. We enjoyed dinner at a lovely restaurant next to a canal with the IAP group. -anna

Cake!

One day Yan got a phone call that said, "Your package from Austria is stuck in Amsterdam" which confused her very much as she hadn't ordered anything from Austria. June was convinced someone had sent us a bomb. After a little bit of investigating, we found out two cakes and coffee were on their way from Austria to China thanks very much to Professor Gmachl! They took a little detour and visited Amsterdam first. We were very excited when the package arrived. Yan took good care of the package giving it a chair to sit on during lunch and shielding it from the rain. We shared the cake with many MIRTHE and IAP members and everyone agreed that it was delicious! -anna