West Lake at Night

Anyone who has heard of West Lake has probably heard of its beauty. But unless you have gone there and lived there for a little time, it might be hard to understand this beauty.

At night, it is no less pretty. It sits quietly reflecting area-lights and the misty sky so there is always a moving gradient of colour with long reflections of buildings and lit places on its shores. While you might think that this is a common property of metropolitan lakes, West Lake has an odd tranquility at night that seems quite unique. I think this is largely due to its size - it is not too big but not too small. It is large enough that it is not easy to see across, but small enough that you can see the other side. Also, the skies in China offer a lot more light than say, Australian skies, so even mountains on the distance are dimly outlined, making the whole scene much more contextually interesting.

During my stay, I would often go with friends to shop or eat by the lake and spent many evenings sitting or walking along its shores. They say that without West Lake, 80% of Hangzhou would die from heartbreak.

Here are a few other pictures of this nature

West Lake at Night

Living as a Celebrity

Being tall and white in China, especially in the more rural areas, is an easy way to be noticed. Children would gaze up as though I had just changed their lives and I would continually hear things like "Na me gao!" which translates to "so tall!" or "lao wai", wich means foreigner. Unlike in a Western country, where if people said too many things of this kind offence might be taken and therefore expected, in China this was a well practised reaction to people of my kind. In fact, at no point during my stay did I feel as though I was being challenged or made a mockery of, by Chinese people at least.

In some places people would approach and ask to take photos which was quite an interesting feeling. Being an instant celebrity is worthwhile for ones confidence and the opportunities and friendships that can be made are quite endless. On the 16 hour train to Beijing I met a girl from Hangzhou who I would later meet again and become good friends with. In Beijing, Morgan and I met a girl who helped us around because she was interested in practicing English. I think in the end I learnt more Chinese in our interactions than she learnt English but it was a good time nonetheless. People were not only more willing to talk to me than they might be in other places they were also more interested in helping me. I once went to the hospital where there was a queue of 20 or more people waiting to see the doctor. However, as soon as the nurses saw me, they led me straight into a doctor's office where I was seen to immediately. I also had 6 or 7 nurses looking after me the whole time.

I think in the long run this is not a good thing for China. However, it does allow for great steps in foreign relations.

The Old Chinese

In China, there are a lot of old people. There are a few reasons for this, but one outstanding one is that they are taken care of and they take care of themselves quite well. Because there are so many old people, and because there are many fewer children (whose parents are busy trying to support their family’s) the grandparents are often seen caring for children. They are well respected and well cared for, in some ways they make me think of fat and sassy things, although rarely are they either.

Linyin Temple, like many places in China, is often full of grandparents and children. The location itself is a medium-sized Buddhist temple surrounded by a large garden. While it is not cheap to get into the garden and you need to pay again to get into the temple, it is quite a nice place to walk and explore the caves. As you can see, there are also vines that grandmothers would climb on.

As well as taking care of children, the ancient in China often get up very early and walk around doing odd exercises. These can include almost any normal activity as well as a lot of rather unusual ones. Some that ought to be mentioned are walking backwards for extended periods, throwing oneself against hard objects, shouting loudly over bodies of water like West Lake, and ballroom dancing next to the lake at 5:30 am. I am too young of mind to understand the full benefits of these activities but they must be doing something right because these people are not at all young, often above 80 and often they will spend the rest of the day looking after a 4 year old.

Old people in China are very active and are often seen doing things that seem, at first glace, to be more suitable for younger and fitter people. For example, very old people still ride bicycles with complete confidence and ease to get around the city, often with large and heavy loads strapped to the bikes. They also continue to work in the family business long past the Australian retirement age of 65. Also, on multiple occassions, my friends and I have struggled to climb some mountains (like Moon Mountain in Guilin and Yellow Mountain in Anhui), only to be passed by old people in their 70's who were not only going faster than we were, but were carrying boxes of drinks from yokes on their shoulders so that they could sell them to us.

Zing Gang and a Workshop

As part of our preparation for the Red Dot competition the creative group went to Zing Gang, a larger newer campus of ZJU, to do a workshop on innovative pipelines for groups.

Before we started they showed me around the campus for a while. It was quite beautiful and very spacious although not quite complete. Between classes the rodes teamed with students and bikes and during classes they were baron with almost no one walking around. It is enclosed but so large that walking through it would not be convenient for most people so the only people there were students.

The aim of the workshop was to help students work together on innovative or concept rich projects from a western point of view. I was talking about a few ways of looking at tasks and breaking them up to create better work hand offs within long projects. The method I was discussing involved having various meetings involving the whole team to ensure continuity and being true to the intentions of other project teams within the group.

Before I started talking we walked around to find a good place for everyone to sit down. There is a body of water in this campus so we thought sitting near it would be nice. I found a tree and tried to climb up and sit in it so I could look over the group better but as I swung on the first branch it broke and I fell to the ground. This was quite amusing and we eventually decided sitting on the ground would be safer. On later attempts of climbing on things I was cautioned as people reminded me of this incident. Perhaps one day I will learn.

After introducing the ideas we did a trial run with a slightly reduced work flow as we only had one afternoon and a team of about 20 people. We started with a finding need exercise in which people would conduct random interviews on the streets of the campus during lunch time. After a while we presented findings back to the group and moved on to information processing and then brainstorming.



By the end of the day we had a lot of concepts and were all tired so we went to a restaurant just outside the campus and had a big meal. That night I went to a Korean drinking party that turned a bit risqué before ending with an underage American boy passing out. I for some reason offered to carry him off and which was quite a ordeal. Eventually I got home to find that I had had some form of food poisoning and was quite ill for the next day or two. I miss China.

Design Boom: Shelter in a Cart

This was a group approach to a Design Boom competition titled Shelter in a Cart. The aim of the competition was to develop a cart for homeless people that could be used both to move belongings as well as provide shelter for the owner.

My role on this project was as a member of the core innovation team. In this role I helped manage other parts of the team and helped people contextualize homeless situations around the world. I also ran a workshop called "Finding Need" that aimed to help people look at ways to find problems that are not too hard to solve. I was asked to do this because I had been working for a company in the United States doing a large scale feasibility study on a management work over that required me to find problems within the current system that were solvable within the context of the desired change.

I was not able to be part of the finishing team as I was out of town on another project during the time of the final push.

I think that I learnt a few things from this project, but what has seemed most valuable was the knowledge that things I know and have learnt through experience or formal education can be useful for other people. At the time of this project I was struggling hard to overcome the language barriers and although a few member of the team were quite good at English, most had quite a bit of trouble and at this point my Chinese was non-existent.

New in Shanghai and a 3D DCC Conference

As Jiang and I shared an interest in 3D digital content creation, he notified me that there would be a conference in Shanghai on teaching and practices in DCC. I of course went, but because I was on a business trip for some of the time that the conference was on, I only got to go to the last day of the conference.

I arrived in Shanghai city for the first time late at night at the old South Station. At the time I spoke no Chinese and was new to everything about the layout of Shanghai so I was alarmed when the train stop was in the middle of seemingly nowhere. After a few moments I found someone with a pay phone (in China pay phones are often privately owned by small businesses on the side of the road) and called Jiang - however, he did not answer. I tried again and it continued not to work. Eventually I walked around and after a short while I ran into Jiang and Dr. Yao. They took me to dinner with some of their friends and we then went to Dr. Yao's home to spend the night.

The next morning we got up early to attend the conference. We started by visiting the head office of Compaq and HP in China and after a brief talk there we went to Autodesk Shanghai where they showed us some product road maps for their Discreet product lineup. They took us out to lunch after that and that was all that I saw at the conference.

That afternoon Jiang and I walked around Shanghai city and much later that evening Jiang had his camera stolen at People's Square station. This was quite a sad happening and we returned to Hangzhou the next day.

Yu Mao Qiu

In China, most people play some kind of sport and often they will ask you to join them. The most popular sports are table tennis, badminton, soccer, tennis and basketball in no particular order.

When I first went to China, I had only ever played soccer out of these sports but relatively quickly I was being called upon by my Chinese and international friends to join them in playing various sports. I am quite frightened of balls in general so I never participated in soccer or tennis and only once in basketball, but I gradually became able to make returns and eventually play volleys in ping pong and badminton.

In badminton, I have a large advantage because I am not that short and neither are my arms, so I can avoid the usual running around and just stand in the middle of the court. In ping pong I have the same properties, but it turns out that they are a disadvantage in this sport. I am too tall, so getting low enough to really gauge the ball's movement is a little tough. As I was playing with my lab mates one day, one of them, Dr. Yao, insisted that I lower my stance and instantly I found I improved immeasurably. I went on to beat him once or twice as well as a number of the other people in the lab.

On another note badminton in Chinese is "yu mao qiu", which literally translates to "feather ball". I think that is a pretty nice name.