June 5th 2010

Hi everyone, first of all: sorry for the late answer/news from China. There was a lot going on.

So, what happened in the last weeks here in China? Work is progressing well. I got a scholarship from the Chinese Academy of Science, which will triple my current salary (jippiiiii). Also, I am advancing in my current projects. I tried to help a colleague improve one of his papers for publication. In the end my boss suggested to make a separate paper from my calculations and considerations. Not bad, for actually two days work :-). Now I just have to write the paper. This is my least favorite part. We make quite some progressions in our English lessons. Especially the pronunciation of has quite improved and I usually understand them when they are talking to me. I also got rather good in guessing the content when they are trying to explain something they don’t know the right words to. And when it comes to interpreting Chinese signs and short texts (just by remembering the few Chinese characters I know). I start to understand simple sentences or words. But I still have a long way to go :-). In the moment we are using first grade children’s books to learning Chinese.

One of my new colleagues defended his thesis: 54 Powerpoint slides in 30 minutes and in Chinese. I literally did not understand a word. The discussion afterwards was similar to the procedure in Ulm. I was told afterwards, that the other professors (7 altogether) had neither experience with the methods nor the materials analyzed. Therefore the discussion only took 30 minutes. Afterwards we had to wait 30 minutes until the result was announced. Obviously the professors started to talk about other things and forgot about the students waiting outside. Just like in Ulm. I remember telling Martin (Pietralla) before my defense to keep the discussion on my grade short. If I attend another
defense here I will remember to do that, too. In the evening we went out to celebrate. The restaurant was in the style of the Cultural Revolution and it got pretty loud and funny. In the end everyone was trying to get someone else drunk. Fortunately, Chinese beer is a light beer in German standards. I should mention, that German beer is also significantly better (no offense, Fengzhen 😉 ). By the way: I was out for dinner with some of the colleagues several times. Once we had pots with soup on our tables, heated by induction heating embedded in the plate, where we put vegetables, noodles, duck blood (really!), meat slices, and so on, in. The style was quite funny. Another time we ordered way too much food, since we underestimated the size of the plates. I should explain: here, you usually order some dishes from the menu which are put in the middle of the table (or on rotating disks in the middle of the table). From these plates everyone can take what he likes. When we ordered too much, we took the remains home in doggy-bags. This is also quite common here. You probably have heard some strange story about the dishes here (scorpion, dog, cat, …). Until now, I had no such specialties. But I tasted donkey, which is not bad. What I thought was snake skin turned out to be just doufu (Tofu), which is actually quite good here.

I also managed to go to another city here by train. Actually, I would surely have failed, but a colleague came with me. She helped with getting the train tickets, telling the taxi drivers where to go and also explained to me some about the city we where visiting: Jilin. The city is smaller than Changchun, but nicer. It starts with the traffic, which seems less aggressive (i.e. less honking) than in Changchun. Also, there is a big river running through the city like in Ulm – I really like that. We visited some temple areal in Jilin, devoted to Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. The temples were rather new (built in 1979) and most of the statues where made from plastic, which made them looking rather cheap. But the overall scenery was very nice. Most of the temples also had description plates in (rather bad) English. I guess they used Google Translate ;-).

In the last two weeks we played a basketball tournament here at the institute. Our boss ordered real basketball shirts from the Houston Rockets for us and everyone got to pick his own number. Not thinking much about it I took the 11. Afterwards I found out, that the only Chinese player in the NBA (US Basketball league) is playing for Houston (therefore the Rockets shirts) and has the 11 on his back. Can you believe that? And no one bothered to give me a hint about that. Well, when I found out we had a good laugh. By the way: the shirts cost 2 € (!!!) and are probably not original adidas. But they look quite right. From the three games we played we won one and lost two. I also got to play a few minutes (although I haven’t played for 12 years).

The shadows of the upcoming world cup are also reaching for China. In the last English lesson we discussed the possible results and voted on the outcomes. Obviously we are going to place a bet in the Chinese lottery. The good news: Germany will finish its group first and then will win against Slovenia in the 8th final. When we voted on the quarter final (against Argentina) I had to close my eyes. Otherwise they wouldn’t dare to vote against Germany ;-). Unfortunately the vote was 3:8 against Germany (of course I was one of the 3). According to our vote, Spain will win the world cup against Brasil. Since we had two ties in that vote, they will win in a penalty shootout ;-).

Well, that was a lot about my last weeks. Some more remarks:
I met someone from the department of Biophysics in Ulm here! She was a PostDoc with Nienhaus and came back to China. Funny enough: she is living with her husband in the same building as I, just one floor below me.
We have reached summer here. Temperatures are 20 (morning) – 30 °C (evening). Since there is always some wind, it feels quite nice. We practically skipped spring (which is rather funny for a city called „Long Spring“ in translation).
There are also parks in Changchun which are not completely filled with people. For example the Changchun Park. One can actually relax there. At the south lake park it is rather hard to find a secluded spot.
Once I was out for lunch with my Chinese teacher and a colleague. Obviously a mother on the neighboring table told her child, that my Chinese sounds like the child’s when it started to talk :-). To be honest: I am fine with that.