china: day two

Today was the first day of classes. Tai Chi is far more difficult than it looks--the mental effort involved, at least for me, felt somewhere between country line dancing and playing trap set.

After that, we spent two hours learning the Chinese language. I was more in my element here--this will be my fourth language, and I'm finally starting to learn how to learn languages in general. The most challenging part is that there isn't an accurate way to approximate Chinese sounds with Latin characters. The sounds in Japanese are a strict subset of the ones in English, and the sounds in Spanish are nearly so, but there exist vowel sounds in Chinese that are completely different. The letter 'i' has to work pretty hard when it's representing a sort of schwa pronounced in the back of the throat with the tongue rolled.

The rain stopped this morning, allowing us to tour the campus at last. There is a striking set of sculptures near the library. Each represents one of China's major contributions to ancient science: the compass, explosives, paper, and printing.

Following the tour was a lecture on changes in Chinese government since 1978. Frankly, it was disappointing. It was all about what had happened, and how the government is structured now. Granted, this is important information to know, and it sets up a mental framework from which we can begin to ask "why?" and "how?". Unfortunately, the professor had no answers for those questions, and so what could have been a fascinating exploration of Chinese culture and psychology became a dry history lesson.

Above: Statue near the gate to XJTU
Below: UNL students in front of the XJTU library

Below: Xi'an outside the University gates

In the evening, Dr. Li took us to a questionable-looking massage parlor. Despite its outward appearance, it turned out to be legit. A 70-minute back and foot massage there, plus a bottle of beer and a serving of spicy noodle soup delivered straight to us, cost a grand total of 40 yuan, or $5.88, per person. Hooray China.

china: day one

It has been raining since we arrived in Xi'an, so Dr. Li decided to forgo the campus tour. Instead, we spent time getting situated in our dorm rooms and buying things from the local Wal-Mart. It was an extraordinary experience. Wal-Mart here is for rich people; the prices on average are much higher than they are in other stores, even though they're lower than they are in the United States. Imported items and electronics still cost about the same; the extra shirts I bought were ironically the most expensive items in my cart.

In the evening, our class met with a group of Xi'an Jiaotong University students. I had a fascinating conversation with a senior software engineering major. He said that software engineering degrees are not common--formal education for the discipline is new, just as it is in the States. The way XJTU goes about teaching it is very different from UNL's approach, however. My software engineering education involved design patterns, testing techniques, and software project management methods. The program at Xi'an involves "C, C++, Java, and some newer things like AJAX, ASP.NET, and C#. You know C#? We also take some computer science courses, like operating systems and SQL." There's no project management in the curriculum, as far as I can tell. They're learning how to use the tools, but not which ones to use or why to use them. To borrow a phrase from Matthew Mengerink, it sounds like software engineering students at XJTU are majoring in shovel.

china: day zero

We flew from Omaha to Xi'an today. The first three legs of the flight went without a hitch: Omaha to Denver, Denver to San Francisco, and San Francisco to Beijing. The international flight was pleasant, and, strange as it sounds, the food was fantastic. The crew served a beef noodle dish that was on par with the ones Noodles and Company makes.

The fun started on landing in Beijing. The Chinese authorities are absolutely paranoid about swine flu. Every passenger on that flight was required to fill out a form with information about temperature, symptoms, cities visited in the last week, and whether or not that passenger had "contact with pig" recently. We then formed a line (incidentally, the Chinese are really bad at queues--leave more than a hand's breadth between you and the person in front of you, and someone will cut in line) to be photographed by infrared fever-sniffing cameras. One student was running a fever after receiving a tetanus shot in the last week; she was detained for ten precious minutes of our short layover. We then went through customs and a second round of infrared cameras before being told that our checked luggage had arrived here and would need to be checked again. Next, we took a train to the domestic flights concourse--to find that there's no security bypass between international arrivals and domestic departures. We went through security. Again.

We did, however, make the flight to Xi'an. The moral of the story? Get a long layover at the first airport in each country if possible.