Fifty Moganshan Road

Last week, there was an article in one of the local magazines about a growing artist neighborhood in Northwest Shanghai at a place called 50 Moganshan Road. This Sunday, I met up with a classmate from Stanford (Katie) who's also in Shanghai for the summer, and we thought we'd give it a go and see what we found there. A metro ride and one very sweaty and dusty walk later, we were walking down Moganshan Road and trying to figure out which editor had goofed and let such a big typo in their magazine. It didn't seem that this 50 Moganshan Road place existed - all that was between number 100 and number 20 Moganshan Road was a big construction site full of scaffolding and green tarp. We'd come all the way down there, so we figured we ought to at least go inspect a bit more and see what we could find. Further back into the construction site, we saw that there were some big concrete block buildings that looked pretty sturdy, so we went on inside.

The hallways were lined with piles of boxes and assorted junk, but once we'd walked down a bit we started to see colorful signs directing us into some of the rooms along the hall. It turns out that inside these big warehouse buildings, local artists had made spaces for themselves. A lot of them were combined studio and gallery spaces, where the artists were working and displaying their finished pieces for sale together. Some even had apartment-like extensions with kids running in and out and TV's blasting in back rooms. We wandered around for the afternoon, and found everything from modern conceptual sculpture to more traditional still life paintings of apples to multimedia and photo projects.

There were only a couple of other people who had managed to find the place at the same time as us, so it was a strange feeling to be walking around as the only intruders into many of these studio spaces. A lot of times that artists just looked up and nodded when we came in and then went back to their work, but some took more interest in us. We first got stopped by one young artist who wanted to know whether we thought Chinese or American art was more powerful, and then went on to give us a detailed explanation of these French artists who were making art out of lighting gundpowder patterns and photographing it: that was a fun one to translate... We had a slightly more successful conversation with a young woman artist who studied philosophy at Beijing Univerisity and was very enthusiastic about Tibetan Buddhism and traditional Chinese musical instruments. After an afternoon of climbing up and down dusty stairways and over rickety bridge constructions to little studios that were tucked away down alleys and on the top floors of warehouse buildings, I felt a little thrill at finding a place that still seemed like a bit of a secret from the hordes.


[1-Looks like the entrance to a gallery compound, doesn't it?;
2-Getting closer now, along the hallway of a warehouse]



[Some of the studios, once we actually found them]

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A Day (or Two) at the Circus

All the guidebooks say that if you're in Shanghai then you have to see the circus. Soon after arriving, Krystal and I took their advice, found a likely looking place (the name "Shanghai Circus World" was a bit of a giveaway), and coughed up the exorbitant fee of $15 for tickets. Little did we know that we would be having a planned (and free) field trip with our language classes to an acrobatics show two weeks later, which turned out to be pretty much the same thing. Oh well, at least now we can say we know most of the acts by heart. Plus, getting to go the second time around let me take some pictures, since the first time I was actually paying attention to the show.

It seems that the most standard piece is the contortionist act, where a woman folds her body in all sorts of unnatural ways and then looks out at you from underneath her own butt. In the first show we saw, the contortionist act had two women, which was even more impressive/grotesque as the stockier one would be holding herself on one arm in some strange position while the lighter one balanced on her abdomen doing something else equally disturbing. Then there's the plate spinning act: in the first show it was more of a comedy routine with an old guy spinning plates on tables; in the second there were dozens of women spinning plates on long sticks while doing gymnastics and walking on each others shoulders (pretty impressive). Then there are the whole range of acts involving men jumping through hoops or onto tall objects/each other. Both shows also had flying while holding onto fabric routines, although the first show made it a bit more interesting - they played it up to be a dramatic romance scene, with a man and a woman doing acrobatics while flying through the air and holding onto long billowy blue and silver fabric.

Maybe it's just the craziness of the traffic here providing some sort of artistic inspiration, but both shows also made a big deal of bikes and motorcycles. In the second show, one of the acts ended up with about 25 women on one bicycle being pedalled around the stage. In both shows, the grand finale consisted of a huge spherical metal cage in which five or six motorcyclists drove in circles around each other did loops up and off the cieling, revving their engines and honking.

Some pictures:

[1-Spinning plates;
2-Some very muscular women]


[1-Two dozen women on a bicycle (pretty much like driving on the streets of Shanghai);
2-Halfway through the grand finale with the big metal motorcycle cage]

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Nightclubs, Noodles, and No AC

So, now I've been in classes for almost two weeks. It's not that long, but it's a long time when I'll only be here for two weeks more. Everyone else in language classes arrived about a week after Krystal and I got here (as our program had originally told us the wrong dates, we both got here a week early). There are a lot of people from Europe, Korea, and the states. Within the foreign student population, there are also a lot of European overseas Chinese people - it was a new phenomenon for me to hear Chinese people walking around speaking Italian, Dutch, or French. I hang out with a relatively small group of people most of the time - Krystal and I still do most things together, along with a German girl named Christina, a French girl named Anne-Rachel, and a guy from Florida named Tyler. There are a couple of other people we tend to do things with, but it works out nicely to have a relatively small group of people to remember to invite whenever we go somewhere.

In terms of school, I got placed into the upper intermediate class, which seems to be about the right level. We have class for four hours every morning - two hours doing the new vocabulary and text, and two hours doing practice excercises. The first teacher is excellent - she speaks quickly but we all understand her, and she seems to have a pretty good idea of what level we're at so that she knows when she needs to stop and explain something. The second teacher is not so good - he speaks incredibly slowly, but still nobody can make much sense of him. It's partially because he has a really thick accent, and partially because he doesn't ever really explain the complicated grammatical terms he uses. For example, I went on for an entire class one time without realizing that we were talking about rhetorical questions because he just kept using the term for rhetorical question in Chinese without saying what it meant. I would have asked him what the term meant, except that it was always buried in a sentence full of other terms I didn't know, so it was hard to single out which part exactly I didn't understand so I could ask him about it. Most people just leave after the first two hours now - I'm one of the few suckers who always thinks that maybe today will be the day he says something enlightening. Anyway, I don't mean to come off too negative - I am learning a lot of new material and overall I think the program is pretty good.

Besides the struggle to get to the classroom at 8am and the 4 hours of class, my daily routine also consists largely of finding food. I've found some better food options nearby (with the help of other students) in the past week or two. There is a pedestrian mall the the south of campus where there are lots of small shops serving rice and noodles at all hours of the day. There is also one little shop run by a Chinese Muslim family that has hand-pulled noodles - I go there four or five times a week to get a steaming plate of lamb and noodles, and the owners are starting to recognize me and give me extra little dishes. When I just need some vegetables, there is a vaguely European restaurant on the same street as our dorm that has good Caesar salads and a combination of Western, Chinese, and Indonesian food and a nice atmosphere to sit down in for an hour or two - the noodle and rice shops are mostly in-eat-out type places. I've been lucky so far in that I haven't really had an upset stomach; all of the other people I hang out with seem to complain of vaguely disturbed stomachs about half the time and I eat at most of the same places that they do. I am taking care to eat vitamins and stay hydrated, so I think that generally helps my body out a bit, but other than that I'm just hoping that my luck will continue.

Speaking of luck, apparently the good stomach luck I was getting during the first week of class must have cancelled out any good housing luck that week - on Wednesday night we came back from a sweaty and smelly bar (see Zapata's, below) to find that our air conditioner had blown. This might have been due to the fact that we left it on 18 degrees Celsius (64 F) most of the time because of the blistering heat outside and the fact that we're on the 10th floor. However, we knew several people who left theirs on 15 C all day and their machines were still going strong. After sleeping through a restless and sticky night (despite two showers), I marched down to the front desk first thing in the morning and demanded that they do something about it. They said that they would call the air conditioner repairman, but it would be up to him when he could come. This went on for three days, during which I came to the desk every couple of hours and the attendant just shrugged and told me that the repairman said he would come that day, but that they couldn't do anything about it. The only rest we got during this time was when I plugged the AC into an extension cord and into another socket, resulting in a wondrous three hours of air conditioning before the AC blew the extension cord. Finally I just gave up on the existance of this fabled "air conditioner repairman" and demanded that they changed our room. After the usual progression of "we don't have any open rooms" to "ok, we have some rooms but I'm not authorized to move you, I have to talk to my boss who is (coincidentally) gone for the weekend" to "fine, just leave me alone, and here are your keys," I managed to secure us a new room on the same floor (and with a much better view). Of course, literally 5 minutes after we had just finished moving all of our stuff to the new room, the air conditioner repairman of legend triumphantly arrived. Lovely.

So what have I been up to when I haven't been searching the horizon for the AC repairman and making enemies among the front desk staff at my dorm? I haven't really been into the city as much in the daytime as I had before classes started, but I have started to go in a lot more at night. A lot of the other students are very into going out and trying all of the different bars. Frankly, a lot of them are idiots who just want to get plastered every night, but it is nice to have people scout out places around town and let us know which ones are worthwhile. One of my favorites so far is a jazz club called the Cotton Club, which is a small place with big plush chairs and a prety good house band. The band consists mostly of American expats with a couple of Chinese trumpet players, and the crowd seems to be a mix of well-off locals, expats, and some tourists. A block down is another jazz club called JZ, which attempts to pull off a bit more of an upmarket look with two levels and a lot of velvet draped around.

Wednesday night is ladies night at Zapata's, a "Mexican Cantina" where there is not a single Mexican (or Spanish-speaking) person on staff or anywhere to be seen. We went to ladies' night last week because it means free margheritas from 9pm to midnight and cheap(er) food. The place tends to get a bit sleazy, with mostly European and American tourists and expats getting completely wasted and dancing on the bar. Then there are the sketchy middle-aged businessmen who show up to leer at the twenty-something girls, and the prostitutes who show up to scout out the sketchy middle-aged businessmen. It makes for quite a scene, but after the free margheritas stop flowing it's not really worth sticking around.

Another sweaty and loud type place is Guandii, which we went to for a guy's 21st birthday. It is a hip-hop club that seems to mostly play radio hits from 6 months ago, with a lot of local clientele who are mostly embarrassingly uncoordinated. Not that I'm one to talk, considering my almost complete lack of rhythm. Anyway, I probably should have taken the opportunity to dance while I wouldn't have been the worst one on the floor, but I was content to sit outside on the patio and watch the birthday boy get a beer shower at midnight.

Before everyone else arrived, Krystal and I had checked out the prerequisite local Irish pub, O'Malley's. Admittedly, it was a Wednesday night, but the place was pretty dead, and there was some terribly off-key guy strumming his guitar and singing classic rock. We couldn't decide if he was being paid to entertain us or if the bar staff just weren't kicking him out. I do have to say that it scored a couple of points over Zapata's because they actually had Irish expats working the bar and the businessmen seemed to be there to have a beer with other businessmen, rather than to pick up college-aged girls.

The nicest place so far has been a place called Bar Rouge, which has a prime location downtown with a huge outside patio overlooking the river across to the upmarket Pudong region with all the lit-up skyscrapers and hotels. Inside is the bar, along with big plush lounging areas centered around tables (which must be reserved for $100 for the night). The tables outside also have to be reserved for some astronomical amount, so most of us ordinary folk ended up leaning against the railing and enjoying the view.

So, overall, I've started to do a bit less exploring in the day, and a bit more in the night. There are probably hundreds of other clubs and bars I haven't even heard of, but I'm content going to one or two a week and seeing if I stumble on anything else worthwhile. I think one month was probably a pretty good amount of time to be in Shanghai - it's a lot of fun and there's a lot to do, but I don't get an awful lot of learning done and it's hard to find people to speak to in Chinese (although my taxi and directions vocabulary is becoming spectacular). We'll see how the next two weeks go...

[View from the patio at Bar Rouge]

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Assault on the Great Firewall of China

So, some of you may have noticed my blog looks a bit different now than it did when I first started it. You might remember I expressed a bit of frustration initially about blogger's site giving me problems, so I went ahead and coded my own page. Coding my own page is all well and good (and a little bit more fun, too), but I realized that as soon as I was away from my own computer with all of my files I wouldn't be able to edit it. So I decided to give this whole blogger thing another shot.

Well wouldn't you know it, no matter what I did I just could not get the site to work. I could get to blogger to create a post, but I couldn't get to blogspot (where the blogs are hosted) to actually see the blog. I asked my friends at home if they were having problems - nope. I figured maybe it was a bug? But nobody else seemed to be complaining about it online. Finally, someone from blogger's help staff emailed me back to let me know that the reason I couldn't access blogspot was that the Chinese government had blocked it. Not only was blogspot blocked, but so were all of the other major blog hosting sites.

Apparently the Chinese government routes all traffic coming from IP addresses in mainland China through several HUGE servers, effectively blocking those with Chinese IP addresses from viewing whatever sites are deemed inappropriate (mainly news websites, sites with information on Tibet independence, places like blogger where people can freely express their political opinions, etc). Check out this article on wikipedia about it if you want to read more about this whole ridiculous endeavor.

After finding out about this firewall (by word of mouth of course - all sites with information on the subject, such as the wikipedia site I linked to above, are blocked), I started attempting to break through. Eventually I found someone who told me about these "anonymizer" programs that will bounce around all traffic in and out of your computer to different servers so that nobody can tell where it's coming from. I ended up using one called Tor, and another guy in my program has been using one called anonymouse.

The whole thing is actually a lot of fun, because I get to feel like I'm putting one over on the government and their whole ridiculous restriction. It's also fun to do google searches, because google automatically detects what country you are coming from and routes you to that country's google site to do a search. However, since my data gets bounced around before it gets to the google server, I get to see where the data was last before google gets it. So far my data's been in Germany, Puerto Rico, Canada, Chile, England, and Italy. Anyway, I just realized it's probably not the smartest thing in the world to talk about putting one over on the Chinese government out in the open on the internet where anyone can see it, but I think I'll count on the fact that I'm a big nobody and I doubt that members of the People's Liberation Army are reading my blog. But while I'm waiting for them to come and hunt me down, I'll just have to enjoy my new blogger-powered blog where I can still fiddle with the design of my site, but I don't have to format everything by hand when I just want to update everyone on my week.

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A Water Town, Indeed

Before classes started, Krystal and I thought we'd take advantage of the free time to explore a bit in the area outside of Shanghai. As Shanghai is right on the coast at the mouth of the Yellow River, a lot of towns and cities in the area are big on canals. Some of the smaller towns that have managed to keep their old buildings intact have started calling themselves "water towns" and playing up the historical aspect to rake in the tourism money. There are quite a few of them, but our guidebooks and the people I spoke to all recommended Suzhou or Zhouzhuang. Suzhou is a proper city (whereas Zhouzhuang is more of a village) and has been popular for longer, earning the nickname "The Venice of China." Zhouzhuang's boom has been more recent, as it was pronounced a UNESCO "Internation Heritage Site" (whatever that means) in 1998. We settled on Zhouzhuang, hoping the crowds would be a bit less dense.

The day started off well, as we dragged ourselves out of bed at 5:30am to see a lovely, wet, gray day dawning. At 6:00am or so, we left our dorm in the northern suburbs of town, took the bus downtown, walked around and realized the metro hadn't opened, took a cab to a bus station at the southern suburbs, and bought our tickets for the 8:30am bus. By the time the bus arrived in Zhouzhuang at 10:00am or so, packed full of Chinese tourists and us two foreigners, it was absolutely pouring down rain. I bought the first umbrella I could find, which of course managed to break two minutes later and leave a rusty metal spoke hanging menagingly in my face and tangling up in my hair.

We soon realized that one of the favorite pastimes in this town was to assault tourists as they walked by the small shops and stands that lined the roads. Even more unfortunately, apparently the same person had taught all of the locals the 10 words of English that they all knew; it seems that this person also thought it would be amusing to tell them to end all of their words in -y. All day long we were attacked by people commanding us to "looky, looky" or "have a lunchy" or buy something from them for "cheapy, cheapy." After five minutes, we escaped the rain and the store-owners by ducking inside the first restaurant whose owners weren't commanding us to have a lunchy. It turned out to be our best find of the day. The first floor was a small shop with some chinese pastries and knick-knacks. The restaurant was on the second floor and looked out on the cobblestone streets and people rushing by under umbrellas below. For two dollars each we had a hot, tasty meal (with vegetables(!) - a rarity around these parts apparently) and a place to sit unmolested for an hour.

After having that time to catch our breath, we ventured back out onto the streets. The town actually was really pretty when vendors weren't grabbing my arm. Apparently about 60% of the buildings were built at least five or six hundred years ago, and the cobblestone streets and stone bridges across the central canal made for a pretty quaint atmosphere. One of the highlights was the South Lake Garden at the south end of town (funnily enough). It was built by a scholar in the Jin dynasty times and had bridges weaving around over the water with little resting spots to sit and relax. Krystal and I were some of the only European or American tourists there. Apparently some people considered us another attraction as we sat in one of the little cupolas; an Indonesian family even came over to take a picture of us with their kids.

Another highlight was when we accidentally stumbled into residential areas of town. We would go from streets packed full of tour groups with megaphones and aggressive store-owners to small deserted roads that passed by houses where local people were getting haircuts, making lunch for their kids, or taking down their clotheslines because of the rain. Happy with those experiences, we ended the day on a positive note, despite the pushy salespeople and the rain. I was just happy that my semi-broken umbrella had made it through the continual downpour. Of course I had grown quite fond of it by the end of the day; I kept using it for another week until three more of the little spokes had snapped or bent completely backwards, and then I was forced to spend $2 to get a slightly more sturdy one. At 4:00pm, tired and wet but feeling accomplished at making the most of the day, we piled back on the bus at and slept all the way back home.

Pictures:

[1-Boat rides down the central canal;
2-A woman at a small stand, selling umbrellas]


[1-Two vendors, taking time out from assaulting passers-by;
2-The proprietors of the restaurant where we ate twice.]

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First Impressions of Shanghai

So now I've been in Shanghai for a couple of days. I'm at Fudan University, which is a bit outside of town (a 40 minute bus or train ride, to be exact). I'm in a double room at the foreign student dorm, and my roommate is another girl in my language program, Krystal. She's half Cantonese and lives in England. She's very laid back and likes food almost as much as I do - I think we'll get along well. On my first day she showed me around a little bit - the area around the university is not super-exciting. There are some restaurants, but none of the ones I've tried so far are particularly good. I'm still looking for a good Shanghainese noodle or dumpling place nearby. There is a Starbucks knockoff called "SPR" that has wireless internet which occasionally works, which is nice.

The first day we ventured into town resulted in very little success at accomplishing what we set out to do, but at least through all the walking we got to know our way around. We found the big foreign language bookstore, which was less useful than we'd hoped; there were no good books on China in English and no pocket maps with the pinyin (Romanized) street names for when we couldn't read the characters. I did get some postcards, though. Then we decided to take the city tour bus that both of our guidebooks described. We figured that we could see which areas looked most interesting and come back to those later. However, it turns out that the tour bus was cancelled two years ago because of SARS, as we were informed by multiple hotel desk clerks. Going into the hotels to check was nice, though, as the hotels themselves were all very fancy and (more importantly) had air conditioning. I guess summer was not the best time to pick to come to Shanghai; it is incredibly hot and humid. I don't know how hot it is exactly because everything's in centigrade, but I do know that I drank two and a half liters of water that first day and didn't have to go to the bathroom once because I sweated it all out.

After finding out the tour bus doesn't exist, we decided to take the boat tour along the Huangpu River that runs through town down to the mouth of the Yellow River. Along the way we took the Bund tourist tunnel, which was a big tacky light show in a rail line tunnel under the river. We also had our first good food experience, as we stopped in a restaurant along a back street and had some dumplings, soy milk, turnip cake, and more dumplings. When we finally got to the harbor, all of tour boat companies informed us that we had missed their last trip. We decided to go see a museum instead, but soon realized that all of the museums we were thinking of visiting were about to close. In the end we just decided to call it a day and head back to Fudan, sweaty and tired.

[Pictures from the Bund Tourist Tunnel]

Our next several trips were more successful. We eventually did make it onto the boat tour along the river, and it turns out that that aquatic ecosystem of Shanghai consists mainly of loading cranes and cargo ships, with a couple of smaller boats loudly putting around for diversity. The river tour also introduced us firsthand to the huge quantities of air pollution that a growing city can generate. Later, as we walked downtown along the main shopping road, Nanjing Donglu, that point was reinforced - the multitude of billboards and towering buildings just got lost in the smog after a while.

[On the river tour: 1-Cleaning a ship;
2-City in the mist... er, smog]

On a more positive note, one of highlights so far was the Yu Gardens area. The gardens were created by a wealthy Ming Dynasty family (according to the Lonely Planet, anyway), and they consist of a maze of immaculately groomed plants, sculpted rocks (or "rockery" as the signs stated), zig-zag bridges, and small buildings for prayer, reading, or contemplation. The abundance of tour groups did detract a bit, especially as the guides all seemed to feel it was necessary to use a megaphone even if there were only five people in the group. Outside the actual gardens, there is the Yu Gardens bazaar area which has tons of shops - and more importantly, restaurants. Overall, the whole place (the gardens and the bazaar) is a bit touristy but still a cool area to wander around and get food.

[At the Yu Gardens bazaar: 1-The line for dumplings at a particularly popular stand;
2-Some of the shops lit up at night.]

[In the Yu Gardens themselves]

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Leaving on a Jetplane... Repeatedly

So right now I'm in Shanghai. How did I get here, one might ask? Well, the answer is that I bravely put myself at risk of deep vein thrombosis in order to fly back to the states from Australia and right back to China the next day. Stupid, huh? The problem was that we had booked the tickets to go on tour together as a team way back in January, and I still had no idea what my plans where at that point so I couldn't make alternate arrangements.

Of course, there was also another complication. When we arrived at the airport in Sydney, it turns out that two of the doors on our plane didn't open, so they were kicking off 90 people because of safety precautions (evacuation procedures and so on); of course it made sense to boot off the entirety of our team. The ten girls who had only come for the Australia part of the trip were on a flight to Los Angeles on a different airline at about the same time, so some of our teammates haggled and got about 10 of us onto that flight with them. Everyone who was an emergency case (those who had connecting flights that they would miss, one girl whose grandmother had just died) managed to get on the plane. But then they closed the long runway at the airport because of high wind. That meant we had to take off using the short runway, but taking off on the short runway meant that we couldn't carry an entire tank of gas because that would be too heavy. So we had to stop over in Fiji to refuel, putting us back several hours and bringing the grand total flight time to LA to about 14 hours.

Once we were in LA, all of the girls who were originally on that flight missed their connection to San Francisco because we were 4 hours late. Those of us who had haggled our way onto the plane still made our connection, which was later that afternoon. However, after we'd boarded the plane and sat down, the flight attendants informed us that they didn't know where the pilot was, so we'd have to wait for a bit. That wouldn't have been so bad except for that the power generator wasn't working, and that wouldn't be a problem when we were in the air because the engine would generate power (or so I was told). However, as we were sitting on a runway, it meant that we had to sit there inside a closed airplane in the Los Angeles heat and sun with no air circulation until they figured out where our pilot was. It turns out he was late coming in from another flight, so eventually he landed the other plane and came over to fly ours.

In San Francisco, I spent the night at the house of one of my teammates, Carey. Her family was great and it made for a really nice, relaxing break between all of the travel. The next morning I frantically tried to get all of my stuff into my bags - I didn't do such a great job of packing, but I figure I'll be pretty stationary for most of my time in China so a couple of extra things won't weigh me down too much. The flight from SFO to Tokyo took about 11 hours or so, and then it was another 3 to Shanghai. I realized that I was going to get into Shanghai too late at night to check into my dorm, so I'd have to find a hotel somewhere. I was hoping one of the flights would get delayed so that the airline would have to put me up in a hotel in Tokyo or something, but of course as soon as I wanted something to go wrong everything went perfectly smoothly. On the flight from Tokyo I sat next to a Japanese woman who was working in Shanghai, she was very nice and helped me figure out at least where the university was on my map so I could get a hotel nearby.

When we landed in the airport in Shanghai, I decided to use the restroom. Bad idea. The toilet backed up and spilled all over my pants, and I only just narrowly saved my purse from the same fate. After waiting for a bit at baggage claim with my soggy pants and the new smell I had picked up, I eventually got my backpack. I picked a random hotel from my guidebook in the middle of town, hopped in a cab (my apologies to anyone who uses that cab after me), and did my best to explain to the driver in Chinese where I wanted to go. By 10:30pm I had a room and didn't have to sleep on the streets, by 11:00 my pants and jacket had been whisked away to the hotel laundry service and I had taken the best shower ever. The next day I finally managed to make my way over to the university and check into my dorm room. Mmmm success.

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Tour!

After a stressful and sleep-deprived spring quarter, a two-week rugby tour to Fiji and Australia was a great way to relax and catch up on sleep. Every two years our team has gone on tour abroad to play rugby and travel. This time we spent one week in Fiji and one in Australia. The week in Fiji we played three games - one against the University of the South Pacific, one against the Under-23 National team, and one against the local team in the town of Pacific Harbor. All of our best players were still in the states trying out for our Under-23 National team, so we got clobbered in the first two games. We also lost the Pacific Harbor game, but only by one or two tries, so that was slightly less embarrassing. But the Fijian teams were really welcoming and laid back, so they helped us from feeling so completely humiliated. The rest of the time we weren't playing rugby, we were at the beach or wandering around town. There wasn't really much to do after the sun went down, so we all got a lot of sleep. It took me sleeping about 12 hours (or more) every day to finally catch up on my sleep debt before the end of the week, and I felt so much better after that. I also read the whole Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy series, which was very amusing.


[In Fiji: 1-on our way to go snorkeling off one of the smaller islands;
2-Me and my teammate Percy on the beach]

In Australia, the other girls who were still in the states trying out for the U-23 team joined us, so we were looking forward to not getting trounced in our games there. However, all of the games ended up getting rained out (they didn't want to mess up their fields). I'm not really complaining, though, because I was pretty much rugby'd out by the repeated beatings we got in Fiji. We spent the whole week in Sydney and got to know a bit of the city. Some of the highlights were the great aquarium, a harbor tour by boat, eating really fresh fish at the fish market, going out to pubs as a team, and wine tasting in nearby Hunter Valley. Shiyan also took me to a really nice restaurant called Tetsuya's - there were 10 small courses, each of which was amazingly delicious. I could probably write a whole blog entry reliving each course, but I think I've written enough today as it is. True to form, I didn't know how fancy the restaurant was and I showed up in sneakers, a Wallabies rugby jersey, and carrying a box of Krispy Kremes (which they put in the coat check for me), but they treated me just as well as all of the other people in dresses or suits.


[In Sydney: 1- A rainbow over Sydney on the Harbor Tour;
2- Me at the Fish Market]


[3 - On a hike in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. It had been raining all week and that day was no different. It was so rainy and misty that we couldn't see much, so some of us called it quits early and went back to town, ate some kebab, took the train back to Sydney, and watched a movie instead.]

Anyway, the whole trip was a lot of fun and just what I needed after such a rough spring quarter.

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Spring Quarter Recap

Since I haven't really been in touch with anyone for months, I'll start by doing a quick recap of spring quarter. I started the quarter off pretty ambitious, taking Math 51 (A multivariable calculus and linear algebra class), Mechanical Engineering 101, Chinese, e-Rhetoric (a part of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric requirement for undergrads), and Chinese Calligraphy. Plus the rugby team was going into national competition, meaning a lot of practice and travel.

In mid-April I went to Florida for a week to play in the rugby Sweet Sixteens. Not only did I miss a week of class (which is a big deal when there are only 9 weeks in the quarter), but I found out that my roommate, Julia, had had a stroke while I was gone. When I got back to school, I couldn't handle everything I had going on. My Math51 midterm was on the day after I got back to school, so I dropped the class. I also dropped Chinese Calligraphy because I didn't really need it for anything.

The rest of the quarter was spent pulling late nights on ME101 group projects, hanging out with Julia at the hospital, cramming for Chinese quizzes, scrambling to catch up on my e-Rhetoric research project, and rugby, rugby, rugby.

After a bumpy first few weeks in and out of urgent care, Julia recovered like a champ. After a couple of weeks in rehab she was walking around on her own and using her left hand. By the end of the quarter, she was (miraculously) pretty much back to normal; you wouldn't even be able to tell she had had a stroke at all. Now she's back home in Louisiana with her family for the summer.

As for rugby, after beating UC San Diego in the Sweet Sixteens and UVA in the Elite Eight during our week in Florida, we were moving on to the Final Four. The Final Four is held at Stanford because we pretty much have the best rugby field in the country. It has always been a goal of the team to win a national championship, but we have always underperformed in the national competition as we've been used to steamrolling teams in our own division no matter if we play particularly well or not. This happened last year when I was on the team, and older players tell me it has happened pretty much every year since 1999 when we last won the national championship. With a new coach and a lot of players determined not to let it happen again, we were working really hard to get ourselves ready and in the right mindset - we even stayed in a hotel off-campus for the weekend so that we couldn't get distracted before our games.

In the Final Four, we played Princeton. We were going really well in the first half, but in the second they came back. We barely held them, but we finally did and won by a couple of points. The next day was the championship match. We were playing Penn State, who had beaten us last year in the Sweet Sixteens and gone on to win the championship. With the close call from Princeton in mind, everyone was determined to get ahead early and stay ahead. It was a blowout; in the end we won 53-6. They didn't score a single try; all of their points were from kicks. I still don't think it's really sunk in that we won a national championship - even after all of the partying we did and the "national champions" t-shirts we all wear around.

[Action sequence of me tackling a Princeton girl that a photographer took at the Final Four]

Mechanical Engineering 101 (ME101) also took up a lot of my time. The class was a lot of fun, but a lot of work. We had two big group projects, and then a third solo project. Luckily I had a really good group both times, so that made things a lot easier and more enjoyable. In Design Project 1, there were 2 basketballs, 4 tennis balls, and 8 ping pong balls inside a triangle. Each type of ball was worth a different amount, and our job was to pick up all the balls and sort them into four boxes so that each box contained the same amount of money. We had to do this standing outside the perimeter of a 9ft x 9ft square around the triangle, using only foam core, hot glue, paperclips, string, rubber bands, and 3ft of dowel. We made a big net to pick up the balls and a sorting machine where each type of ball fell down to a different level and then followed tracks into a different box.

In Design Project 2 (called "Fetch"), we had to make a "pet" and a "human," each of which had to be smaller than 30" x 30" x 30". The pet and the human started out next to each other, then the pet had to go out 6ft, the human had to throw it a tennis ball or a Frisbee, and the pet had to catch the tennis ball or Frisbee and return to the human. This all had to be automated, and the only interaction we could have was to cut a string and set the whole thing in motion. My group made a tennis ball bazooka as the human; the pet was a rat trap racer triggered by catching the ball. Our group was one of the few groups who did the whole thing completely successfully, so that was really exciting. I don't think I've ever put so many hours into something that in the end only took 30 seconds to run. To see a video that one of our classmates took of the project, click here (and let me know if that link is down).

Design Project 3 didn't involve any building; all we had to do was use the design process that we'd learned in class to come up with and develop a product for some particular user group. Based on Julia's suggestion to make bigger, more comfortable wheelchair armrests, I designed a foldout table for wheelchairs that people could use to rest their arms, read, put food, or anything like that. Overall I really liked ME101 and it reaffirmed my decision to major in Product Design (a mix between mechanical engineering and art). I also like Product Design because of the anthropological aspect that comes into play when we have to study people and design things to meet their needs.

As for e-Rhetoric and Chinese, I was constantly behind. In e-Rhetoric we had to do a research project on something having to do with digital communication, and then make a website out of our research. Click here to see what I came up with in the end, after much delay and technical difficulties. Having taken Chinese for two years, I knew exactly what I could get away with and what I couldn't. I ended up getting a good grade, but I don't think I learned as much as I would have if I'd studied everything properly rather than always cramming.

The end of the quarter was extremely stressful as I was trying to catch up in everything. Once finals were over, I didn't really have time to chill because then I started working Grad Crew. Grad Crew is a job where students work long hours every day from the Thursday through Monday of graduation weekend, setting up and taking down all of the chairs, tables, umbrellas, and other various things that are needed for all of the different graduation ceremonies and functions. It pays really really well, but is also a lot of physical labor and very tiring. I also had a million little errands and things to get done, as that Tuesday I was leaving to go on tour with the rugby team. After tour, I would be in China for 6 months, so I had to have everything in order and packed for the next six months before I left for tour. It was close, but everything eventually got done, although I didn't get much sleep in the meanwhile. I was so relieved when it was all done.

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Hello Everyone

Hi there,

A couple of people have commented to me that I've been a bit behind in updating everyone on what I'm doing - point taken. So, after recovering from a hellish spring quarter, I decided to start this blog to write and let whoever's interested know what I'm up to. I won't be updating it every day or anything like that, but if you check back every once and a while there should be something new up. For those who prefer emails, let me know if you want me to email you when I put up a new post. For everyone else, be sure to leave me some comments or send me an email to let me know that at least a couple of people are reading.

Talk to you soon,
Nora

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