Leaving China

After 11 months to within a day in China I did not want to leave and even now still want to return.

While there I had collected so may acquaintances that a week before leaving I needed to start tracking them down to say good bye. I had dinners with many of them, including my class, and then on the day I flew out I had a long bus ride to Shanghai Airport during which I SMSed everyone in my phone contacts list, mentioning my departure and thanking them for helping me have a great time in China. I flew out that afternoon to the United States to visit my parents and fix my Green Card before returning to Australia two weeks later.

I was very sad to leave China. Being there taught me a lot about the world and the work I should do. More importantly, it was one of the only places I have visited in recent years that I really appreciated. At the moment, I intend to return in the next few years to work or continue my studies.

Designing Interactions and Bill Moggridge

When we visited IDEO they had mentioned that there would be a book opening for Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge and that they would be going. We were very interested for obvious reasons so we went up to Shanghai again to attend this even as well as view a Design Korea exhibition.

We caught quite an early train to Shanghai and spent all morning looking at Korean design companies that were interested in providing work to the Chinese market. There was also a lot of student work some of which was breathtaking and quite a bit of other technology related stuff being put on display. It was quite a nice event and it included a few of the big companies like Momo Designs and Samsung. After this, we went shopping in Shanghai for a bit and then had lunch at a rare western restaurant. Then we walked for about 2 hours to the place the book opening was to be held. It was a small gallery and studio used by a local design and art group.


Some of the robots from the Design Korea Show

The talk by Bill Morggridge introducing the book was quite interesting and we got to meet up with a lot of the people we knew from IDEO from our previous visit. One of our team won a copy of the book. At one point, I was introduced to Bill but I didn't really know much about his work at the time so I did not talk to him for long.

The event was quite interesting and when we finally left we caught a slow train home that got in to Hangzhou at about 2 am.

In retrospect I obviously should have had some thing with more impact prepared for my interaction with Bill. He was kind and easy to talk to but I had been too busy to do any background research on him so we just talked about immediate things. I was not astounded by this man.

IDEO WEDO UDEO

After having returned from my summer holiday and then getting settled in the lab, people had started talking about changes that may occur and developments of the lab which may cause it to become more innovative. As I have discussed, a lot of it's work up until this point was more like that of a classic design consultancy. They have had a bit of competition in this sector and are interested in moving meta to get a competitive advantage. In discussion about this with some of my colleagues, I was reminded of that well known company IDEO and remembered they had a Shanghai office. I decided it could be interesting to pay them a visit and I knew that they were generally interested in seeing students and that sort of thing, so I sent them an email. The email address I had for them was defective so I tried a few other things to no avail. However, a few weeks later Soumitri and Simon were in town and Soumitri mentioned that he had the address of someone in that office through another friend. He gave it to me and when I sent the new address an email I got a response within a few hours. They were interested so we worked out a good time for everyone and made our visit.

The time we spent with them was interesting because we did not go with an idea of what we wanted from them and we did not go with anything to show them. They ordered some food for lunch and asked us to introduce our practice. They then talked about what they do and how their office in China interacted with the global company.

I was the team leader of this endeavor as I had originally expressed the interest. My involvement included initiating contact and scheduling as well as developing and managing relationship. Though we intended to continue the project, it is now over as many of the core people involved are no longer part of the lab.

This may not seem like a project as such, but if it is approached in that way the whole thing becomes a struggle to communicate well and offer a good client to costumer relationship. We never decided what service was going to be provided by whom or for whom but we had an interaction that needed to be managed. So I think we can think of it as a project.

Immediately after leaving the IDEO office all the Chinese students I was with started talking about how they thought this company could not work with Chinese clients very well and how it did not match the fast-paced nature of the Chinese market. This is of course true and I spent some time talking to a few IDEOers about this problem. In the coming years they are interested in opening up this office to participate in the Chinese design market more completely.

I learnt a lot from this little project. I learnt that people do respond to an honest request even when they are a design company that most designers look up to. I also learnt that everyone needs help thinking, even IDEO. Of course I also learnt a lot about how IDEO thinks and how they select people for jobs which may one day be important to me. This task built confidence and understanding in me and the team and has helped a few of the lab members get jobs and recommendations for further education programs.

As IDEO is a kind company, they gave us a few souvenirs including copies of the Art of Innovation in Chinese and The Ten Faces of Innovation in English.

After IDEO we went shopping and then to IKEA before returning home to Hangzhou that night.

Automotive Air Purifier

This project involved designing a small device that would filter the air within one's car and indicate its quality or health threat at any one time. Our task was to modernize the look and feel of the product and help integrate the new technologies better. The project was short term and the product is now in production.

My role was that of a consultant, although it ended up including concept development, presentation copy writing and branding for an international market.

Strange though it may seem, the awareness of Chinese people about air cleanliness is quite high and given the feature-oriented technology market, many products are sold that offer readings of air quality and breatheability. As it is a common product, I was asked to look at the way people lived and interacted with this sort of technology from a outside standpoint to offer pointers on design for the final product and product strategy. I was introduced to the project about 3 days before leaving Hangzhou for my summer travels and told that I should keep an eye on the way people did things in different parts of China and try to observe emergent habits involving small personal devices that could make our product more appropriate for the cramped marketplace. I did this; however, when I returned from my travels the project had already started, as a few of our full time staff had been working on the form for some time. They were then implementing the technology within and thinking about how best to market their new product. I was put on with a group of 2 or 3 other people to develop the copy and brand identity of the project.

The technology used in this project included carbon catalytic converters and ultraviolet light to ensure clean, oodour-free air.

This was an interesting but small task so it was out the door before anyone had a chance to get sick of it. A few weeks later, we presented it to prospective clients at the Canton Fare in south China as a representation of our work.

Qian Dao Hu

The Lake of A Thousand Islands, or Qian Dao Hu, is in a remote part of the extended Hangzhou city and takes about 3 hours to get to by bus. I went there over a long weekend with a friend, because everyone had told me it was a worthwhile trip. The township gets its name from a lake which forms part of its coastline, which has many small islands. However, they say in reality it is closer to a few hundred than to one thousand islands.



We arrived in mid morning and while taking lunch, 2 Chinese girls began to converse with us. They then offered to show us around town a little, an invitation we eagerly accepted because we had no idea what was what. They took us the the edge of the lake and showed us to a place where we could book day tours around some of the many islands. Then we walked back though the city to the other side of town where there was another coast of the lake. This area was like a large city square surrounded by shops. At the time, there were people but it was not crowded.

The girls left us, and my friend and I walked for a while only to run into one of the girls for a second time. She invited us to her house where her mother made boiled pork for us. Later that night, we went back to the city square with her. Now it was buzzing with life. People were renting out roller skates and there was a lot of other activity. My friend partook in this while I saw to some emergency work in an internet cafe. One of my classmates needed some help in writing some documentation for a few projects we were working on.

Later that evening, we went to the lake's edge and watched a beautiful fountain show. Fountain shows are quite popular in China but this was probably the nicest I have seen. They used lights underwater to colour it and had remote-controlled spray heads to achieve interesting patterns. It went on and on without repeating for quite some time.



The next day, we took a day tour around the lake to a number of the more major islands. They catered well for tourists of our calibre and provided a lot of interesting things to look at. There were monkeys, snakes, ostriches (which you could ride for 10RMB) as well as a mountain cable car that went up to a look out, each on their own island. It was very beautiful and had some of the clearest water I had seen in Chinese lakes.



The following day, which was our last, we went to the other side of the lake to see a activity park. It was ridiculously expensive so we just walked around before hitching a boat ride back to the main island. On the way home, I fell ill with a cold. I think there is some sort of trend here. Perhaps if I go traveling I should not return home, to avoid sickness.

Please view my extended gallery of this trip.

Qian Dao Hu

Dali and Going Home Sick

The last major stop of my summer travels was Dali, a city near a rather large lake sporting a few temples and a lot of minority culture representatives. Our time there was brief and perhaps the best part was taking a tour around a few attractions on the lake. That said, it was a nice destination and we had a great time there.


Traditional clothes to this region.

The end of my holiday had arrived so I returned to Kunming with Jenny and then flew home to Hangzhou. I had spent most of the travels quite healthy, apart from almost dying in Yangshuo. But in regards to my stomach, I had not had much trouble. The night before going home though, we ate at a restaurant known for its gut wrenching ability. The next morning I was fine but by mid afternoon I felt quite ill. I spent the entire flight back to Shanghai feeling awful but by the time we arrived I was feeling a little more lively. We then got a cab home to Hangzhou.



Though I began feeling better that evening I was still vaguely ill a month later. I think I had a stomach parasite but I never addressed it and now whatever was wrong is better. At least I feel a little less like dying every-time I see food.

Dali

Xishuangbanna and Damenlong

This place seems unlike other parts of China.

From Kunming, we travelled to south Xishuangbanna, a 10 trip on an overnight bus. Here we were rather close to the border of Myanmar and it looked a lot like Thailand. We only had a few days here and most of that time was spent eating banana pancakes because we found a restaurant that made brilliant ones which were the highlight of our trip to Xishuangbanna.


Me impersonating a tree root.

As a side trip, we decided to go 70km further south, making us only 10km from the border to a small town called Damenlong. Usually 70km of driving does not take too long, but on this occassion there was no road and there was a lot of mud as well as a few trucks stuck in it here and there so it took us about 5 hours. To remind us of our efforts, when we got there it was pouring with rain and a seemingly quite uninteresting village. Despite the telltale signs of a meal that would probably result in food poisoning, we had a few noodles while we waited for the rain to pass. The reason we had ventured to such a remote place was that the Lowly Planet guide advised it for 2 temples of the local religion. We visited one then shortly returned as we did not find it too intriguing. The return trip took closer to 4 hours.


Friends eating in Damenlong.

I think this insane day-trip was interesting because it exposed a lot more of the culture than might usually have been experienced. Life there is not at all like life in other places I have visited.

A few days later, we returned to Kunming for one night before going on to Dali.

Please view more photos of these places here.

Xishuangbanna

Kunming and Matilda

Kunming before the day starts and me without having washed.

The train was quite fun and a lot less interactive than my train ride to Beijing. There were four of us at this point but we were spread out between two roomlets. On a train like this, there are soft beds and hard beds. The soft beds are in lockable, air conditioned rooms with 4 beds and the hard beds are in open ended rooms in carriages without AC. We were on hard beds so it was quite warm. Our trip started at 9 am and would end the following day at about 6 am. Despite being too hot most of the day, the evening cooled down and we had a good sleep.


Matilda and Jenny.

The next morning when we arrived in Kunming, it was too early for most shops to have opened. We walked around, found an internet cafe, eventually had breakfast, and then got in contact with Matilda, a friend of Jenny's. She had a bit of extra space at the apartment that she was living in so two of us stayed at her house while the other two stayed in a nearby hostel. We did not do much in Kunming apart from eat brownies and buy pirated dvds. Also, 3 out of 4 of us (plus Matilda) got ill from food, something that Matilda and her friends say happens a lot there.


We were tired. This is Matilda's couch.

After a few days, we took a bus down to another city, Xishuangbanna. A few days later, we were back in Kunming for another night before going to Dali. Jenny and I eventually returned only to leave the next afternoon to go back to Hangzhou.

Da Zai

The view out my window.

From Yangshuo, we went to Guilin where we booked a train ride to Kunming for a few days later. We left Guilin the same afternoon to a small village high in the mountains called Da Zai. To get there, we had to take a bus along a series of mountainous dirt roads, but because there had recently been a lot of big storms many parts of the road were missing. These were in the process of being replaced by men working to repair them and there were piles of dirt and rocks that had fallen.

We eventually got there and on leaving the bus, we were confronted by a crowd of old women who wanted to carry our bags. We told them that would not be necessary and we were happy to carry them ourselves. It turned out this was a pretty stupid thing to do because although they told us it was only a simple 20 minute walk to the place we would stay they did not mention that it was actually 30 minutes and involved climbing over several mountains and many hundreds of stone stairs. During this process, one of my friends nearly passed out as we were carrying quite a lot of stuff. When we eventually reached the top, we were given rooms with amazing views. We walked around that afternoon and I ran into some pony problems on the mountainside.


Pony Problems. It was hogging the pathway. To my right is a steep drop off.

The next day, Jenny (one of the friends I had been traveling with) and I got up early and looked at the sun as it rose. It was quite nice but very small and way too early in the morning so when we returned to the guest house we both fell back asleep. In the next two days, we walked up and down the big mountain as little as possible, it was just too big and steep. Nevertheless, we did go down to the village below and tried to swim in a small creek. It was a bit too cold and because I had only recently been deathly ill, I decided I should not get cold.


These are local women showing us things they would like to sell us.

The local people were quite cool, although some of them spent a little too much time trying to sell things to me. They listened to really great music but sadly, I did not get any recordings. On other interesting thing here was that around mid-afternoon we would be asked what we wanted for dinner - chicken or pig. They would then kill the appropriate creature to make us a meal. At one of these meals I gave in to the efforts of one of the locals and bought 2 plain silver bracelets.


This is me on my way down. Yes, I am carrying a freshly tailored suit. I did not think that through so well.

During our stay, we found a much quicker method of descent, so on our last day we used this instead of the route that had originally been taken. We caught the bus back to Guilin where we stayed one night for one night before leaving by train the next morning.

Guilin seemed to be quite an average city so I do not have any pictures. When we went to pick up our train tickets, it seemed quite likely that the agency we had asked to book us a ticket had run away with our money. In the end, they turned up with tickets for a later train and we set off to Kunming, a 21 hour trek on a "hard sleeper" train that had no airconditioning, even though it was a 40°C+ day. However, the trip wasn't too bad and we had quite an interesting time.

Here is a collection of images from my stay at Da Zai

Da Zai

Luckily I was in room 11. 11 is my favourite number.

Yangshuo

Pretty nice view I think. Lots of little mountains.

Our first stop in our travels was Yangshuo, a small tourist city in Guang Xi province. It ended up being a 12 hour trip by bus - it was made longer because some of the roads that they would usually have taken were washed out by the typhoons a few days earlier. The bus we took was a sleeper bus, which meant that instead of seats, they had rows of bunk beds. The trip was quite good, although the beds were not quite as long as I'd hoped. Sadly, my phone was running out of power so it beeped a lot and I needed it on so I could stay in contact with Fan’s travel guide friend, Richard. Also, I had a temperature of 39°C for the whole night and was feeling a little sick.


Inches from death. Or at least a little sick.

When we arrived early the next morning, Richard met us and showed us around. He also showed me to a barefoot doctor, as my high temperature and illness were becoming an issue. The doctor looked at my tongue and gave me a poisonous drink with twigs that I was to drink 3 times a day for the next 2 days. She also said that if my temperature was not down by later that evening, I would need an antibiotic drip and some Chinese medicine energy solution. By that afternoon, I was beginning to feel better so I went for a boat ride with my other 3 friends to see some of the the famous mountains of the area. However, I began to feel unwell again by the end of the boat ride. When one of my friends went back to the doctor's place to pick up the rest of my medicine, the doctor was alarmed enough at my symptoms that she caught a motorbike back to my hotel room with my friend so that she could examine me in person. She determined that I was still too sick and that I would need a drip. (In China, drips are the preferred form of medicine for anything ranging from a cold to impending death.)

Her establishment could not offer such services, so we went to the establishment of a friend of hers from university, who specialised in drips and more Western medicine. This drip room was a small shop that opened out directly onto the street. They gave me the drip and complementary grapes.

That night, I sweated so much I had to change shirts many times and used every one of the shirts I had brought. The next morning, I felt a lot better and went for a bike ride to a place called Moon Mountain and then climbed it.

Moon Mountain was about an hour’s bike ride from the city. The mountain gets its name from a huge hole through the middle. They say that in the distance from every angle it looks like the moon at a different part of its cycle. In any case, we climbed first to the hole and then to the ridge above the hole. There were old ladies selling bottles of water at the top who were in much better shape than us. We were quite exhausted and they were casually running up and down the mountain with styrofoam freezers full of chilled water and juice. After that, we descended and returned to the city.


One of my friends Kayaking.

The next day, we went kayaking with Richard’s brother which was great fun except that we got exceptionally sunburnt and one of my friends ran into a tree, flipping her kayak and almost losing her camera in the water. The other friend who was with her had to jump in the river to retrieve the waterproof bag. He was very anxious to do this as it held his camera as well as hers.

On the way back from kayaking, we say a truck that had fallen off a small dirt road into a rice field. We had to wait while a crane lifted it back onto the road. This was quite cool and it was really interesting to see how the people dealt with such an occurrence. It was certainly treated a lot more casually than I imagine it would have been in a Western country. But perhaps that is because that kind of thing happens more often there.

That evening, we went to Richard’s house for cooking lessons. It was quite fun, although I think I will not open a restaurant just yet. We also got Richard advice on how to precede with our travels and where to go next. He was very helpful.

Here is a small collection of photos from my stay in Yangshuo.

Yangshuo

Back to Hong Kong

The view, looking north, from the Peak.

Before heading out on our travels, we had arranged meet a two friends in Hong Kong. These were the two friends that we would go backpacking with. I also had to pick up the suit I had ordered. This time, we knew our way around a little better and managed to visit the Peak as well as going to the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, as it had just come out in HK and would not be out in China for many months.

Mongkok makes Shanghai look like a village and Melbourne look like a distant training post.

We then took a train up to the border at Shenzhen and caught a overnight bus from there. It is important to note that the day before leaving HK I though I was dying because my wrists looked thin and the day I left I started to have some sort of cold.


A classic Hong Kong Island Street. Note the tram to ecstasy.

Foshan and Fan Ginsong

This is Fan and me at a one of the largest ceramic showrooms. As you can see, my leg is still wrapped with a compression bandage.

I knew that Fan Ginsong lived in this part of China, so I had contacted him a few weeks earlier asking if he would be interested in meeting up. He was interested so I scheduled a time to go to Foshan for a few days. It turned out that Foshan was only about 2 hours drive from Zhongshan so it was not a problem for a friend and I to get there by bus. Fan then picked us up and took us to their international dorm (in China these often act as hotels as well as dorms) At the time there were almost no students because it was the holidays.

Fan gave a tour of the inner city and left us to walk around for the evening. The next day he showed us their student work from the previous year of graduates and then he took us to the more industrial parts of Foshan, we visited a few of the many furniture markets and ceramics show rooms. These were quite impressive - huge buildings full of furniture of many types. The industrial ceramics were also very impressive. Companies supply incredibly accurate mock wood, brick and stone for external and internal use in architectural settings that is visually indistinguishable from the real thing.

While in Foshan, we discussed the rest of our trip with Fan and he offered to ask a guide he knew in a city we had planned to visit (Yangshuo) to help us. He gave us the phone number of the guide and called ahead about our visit. This proved quite useful later in our trip. We left Foshan after three days.


This is a caterpillar. I saw it at a temple in Foshan

My 21st in Hong Kong

For my birthday, a close friend showed me around Hong Kong for a few days and took me to a great restaurant. We started out from Zhongshan on the morning of my birthday and took a ferry to Victoria Harbour, HK. When we arrived in Hong Kong, we secured our accommodation and then spent the day shopping in Mongkok (a shopping district on the Kowloon peninsula) where there are many camera shops full of rare stock and other nice things. I was very interested in getting a Leica CM or a Zeiss Ikon by Carl Zeiss. Of course, these cameras are several times my budget so I came away with nothing but it was nice to see them for a change.

That evening we went on a another ferry that took us around the harbour during the impressive Hong Kong Light Show. Eventually we got off and walked to a restaurant at Causeway Bay that was in the front of the Hong Kong Convention Centre. I was able to recognise the building because there have been a few Jackie Chan films that feature this building. In any case we had a great dinner and then a whole Haagen Dazs cake (bar one piece we gave to a child from a near by table). After dinner I was feeling "bao si la", (full to the brink of death) so we decided to avoid too much more food or activity after that.


This is the cake, it consisted of 1kg of icecream and needed dry ice to stay cold while we were aboard the ferry around the harbour.

The next day, we continued the quest to look at all the great things available in Hong Kong and walked through Causeway Bay (on Hong Kong Island). At one point, not knowing what to do next, we took a random tram just to see where it would go and for the experience of riding a tram. It ended up that the tram took us to some rather remote and industrial part of Hong Kong. We looked around the wharfs for awhile and then caught another bus. This bus went back to the very top of Tsim Sha Tsui, which was quite a long trip. We then took another bus back to Ocean Terminal, a huge shopping complex, and explored that for awhile.

After three days, we were to return to the Mainland but before that we looked around Tsim Sha Tsui and I had ordered a tailored suit. We would be back in a week or so to pick it up and meet other friends.

Our route back to China included a day trip to Macau which was quite interesting in comparison to Hong Kong. Hong Kong made me think of a Britain that does not rain all the time, where you can buy good local food and where there is an Asian drive for shopping. The public transport is great and most other public services are well designed. Macau, on the other hand, seemed a lot more like its father nation, Portugal. The roads are winding and city planning was done after all the buildings were built. The food is of course great because the fusion has had a long time to develop. I though that Macau felt a lot more European and seems to have retained more history. That said, we did not visit any casinos so perhaps my impressions could be skewed.


This is the Zeiss Ikon, probably my favorite camera.

Heading South

These are the friends that saw me off as I left Hangzhou. Younghee's Boyfriend, Younghee and Shemmy.

After returning from Beijing, I left my ATM card in Shanghai Airport and spent a long week back in Hangzhou preparing to head south. I was to go to a place called Zhongshan where the family of a friend of mine was from. We would stay there for about a week before starting off on an extended travel though mid-China.

Zhongshan was a rather small village but quite a nice place to rest as my foot was still healing. I was staying at the house of a friend's grandfather and essentially every day after Yum Cha, he would go off to play Mahjong for the rest of the day. We had a nice time not doing to much for a change.

After a few days it was getting rather close to my 21st Birthday so we across to Hong Kong. We would return to Zhongshan a few days later before meeting other friends and leaving for our travels.

Bejing and No Great Wall

Upon arriving in Beijing, Morgan and I started a search for our hostel. This took only a little while so we had the rest of the afternoon to walk around. After putting our stuff down, we decided to go see Tiananmen Square and see if we could get into the Forbidden City. It was quite nice and completely unlike a city in south China. One thing I noticed in particular was that the buildings, though not that tall, were just enormous in grandure. Beijing is not studded with sky scrapers like Shanghai - instead it just has a lot of really big buildings, perhaps a large city block wide and 10 or 15 stories tall.

After walking for a short while, we ran into a girl who was interested in practising her English and exploring Bejing with some companions. So she showed us around for the afternoon and pointed out some of the more famous restaurants. That evening, we met up with some other friends.

For the next few days, we travelled inner Beijing and looked at a lot of the sites including Mao’s body which was quite interesting. We then went to visit the Summer Palace which was rather impressive though quite similar to Hangzhou - there was an artificial lake which was designed to be pretty and pleasant to be near.

We were interested in going to the Great Wall but we planned things poorly so we ended up not having enough time to get all they way there and back before our flight left.

I thought Beijing was quite a lovely place and although I was ill almost the entire time with some strange stomach problem I find that I recall the food as being great. One particularly memorable restaurant was a very traditional Tibetan one we drank yak wine of some description and ate food I had never imagined.

Here is a gallery of our trip.

Beijing and Morgan's Visit

Morgan and a Train to Beijing

Soon after recovering from not being able to walk, it was time for summer vacation so I only spent a short time back in the lab before leaving town.

As part of the vacation, an old friend of mine, Morgan, came to visit. We started in Hangzhou and I showed her around with a few friends. Then we went to Shanghai to visit some of the more famous sites. We spent one night there before returning to Hangzhou for a few more days. We had planned to take a sleeper train to Beijing to meet up with some other friends but I failed to get train tickets in time so we were forced to postpone our trip a few days and take hard seats on the 16 hour train.

The train ride was quite interesting as it was full of people - so many that more than half the people in the carriage could not sit down. We were seated opposite two mothers with their two young boys who did not sleep well, which added to the interest. I was sitting next to a girl from Hangzhou, Eve, who later became a close friend. We started talking because her English was not too bad. Her family were sitting near by and they gave us food during the trip. We also talked about the soccer because that night was the final in the World Cup. A friend who was watching the game back in Hangzhou sent me frequent updates on the game via SMS and we were all sad when we found out who won.

That night many people did not sleep and just stood there or slept laying on the floor of the train. It was a surreal experience.

The next morning atendents came around with boiling water for tea and instant noodles. For obvious reasons I was quite nervous about this activity.

Eve, the girl I was sitting next to, got off about an hour before Beijing. We decided to stay in contact.

When we arrived we found somewhere to stay and something to do.


This is some mountain we passed in the train.

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.

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.

Arriving at Zhejiang University

At first the taxi driver did not know where the International College was. This caused only minor problems as he asked a student inside the campus and soon found the right place to go. When we arrived, I walked down a slope with my luggage and entered the building I would live in for the next year.

So far, so good.

I then had find out if there were any rooms. Not speaking any Chinese proved to make this more difficult but I managed (by way of an administrator who had given me his mobile phone number) to get a temporary room for the next few days until things were sorted out.

After putting my stuff down I remembered that humans are meant to eat and looked for some food. By this time it was about 10 pm so the restaurants nearby were already closed. There was a shop nearby but for some reason I did not go there and found an internet connection location instead. Using this I emailed my family saying I had arrived and gave them my room's phone number so they could call me. They did so a few hours later and my life in China started.

Arriving in Hangzhou

The bus from Shanghai Pu Dong Airport took about 3 hours and by the time we got to Hangzhou it was dark. We had made a few stops along the way, one of which I had thought may be mine but someone convinced me otherwise. When we reached our actual destination I proceeded to de-bus and found myself in front of a large stadium which I later discovered was just walking distance from my school. I caught a taxi and presented the driver with a piece of paper in Chinese about what to do with me. This was effective enough and I was taken in through the back gate of Zhejiang University.