Hi everybody, it is time to send you an update about my recent adventures 😉 in China. So, what is new here? I started my English lessons. Right now I have about 10 students attending. After a round of introduction where everyone had to tell me something about himself they are now presenting their home provinces and towns in short PowerPoint presentations. Everyone has to ask questions, not only me. I want them to exercise speaking English. I think I find them already improving. At least they are loosing the fear from talking in English. Right now pronunciation appears to be the biggest problem when they are talking. One of the colleagues has a twin sister, not ten sisters (I was really concerned at first) and young horses have to be trained, not chained or changed. But those moments of misunderstanding are usually really funny. By the way: there is a fine of 1 Yuan (about 10 ct.) on using Chinese sentences. Except when I am talking Chinese – I get a reward from the cash. Unfortunately I have not been rewarded, yet. Our secretary has started to teach Chinese to me. We are still working on the pronunciation. As it turns out, I’ve been stressing one of the tones wrong the whole time. But she appears to be pleased how I improve :-). In May I will start to teach the colleagues Matlab. Maybe I should ask Mathworks to pay me money for promoting their program ;-). My colleagues will then use my programs in order to evaluate their own data. There seems to be a huge demand for advanced data evaluation. I also got two requests from the SSRF in Shanghai.
The Chinese have an interesting approach to heating: the whole town is attached to a central heating system which is fired by 5 factories. They start heating in mid October and end it in the first week of April – regardless of the actual temperatures outside. Since we had temperatures below 0°C last week, the temperature in my apartment continued to drop until they reached 12 °C. Well, this is not pleasant anymore. To endure this I was sitting on my couch in my winter coat with gloves on. Upon asking I found out, that everyone appears to have electric radiators for their homes. Our secretary helped me to buy one for myself (since my first attempt ended with three salesperson talking to me in Chinese and me giving up frustrated). Now I am feeling warm again :-).
Other news in brief:
I found a paper from my new boss, where he presents a hypothesis which is contrary to the results from my PhD. He got it published in Physical Review Letters, which is quite good. After discussing my results and the topic itself we agree that his older paper might be too rigid in its conclusion. I am somewhat relieved :-).
Usage of institute money appears to be less restricted here than in Germany. When I and some colleagues went to eat dumplings last weekend, the secretary paid with institute money and also my radiator can be paid from my project budget. I like that :-). By the way: I also like dumplings.
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