More China phenomena

Here's an interesting article on how the city of Beijing plans to continue the improvement of air quality even after the Olympics: http://english.sina.com/china/p/2008/0928/189001.html.

It's clearly a good sign of sustainability from the government, that everything wasn't just for the show. However, I'll definitely want to see the public reaction, some of what is already expressed in the article. Ultimately their actions will determine if the project is successful or not.

My dad says one reason why democracy is still far from actually happening here is because of the way the Chinese people are wired. There's no single excuse, it's just the way things are done. People look for strong leadership and guidance or they will be as lost as the sheep without their sheperds.

However, there's still hope. The youth here are much more individual and liberal than the old people - to a point even I am surprised - so perhaps slowly, as the generation change takes place, the new way of thinking will be injected into the system.

Inner change will take time. We may not see it in five, ten or even twenty years, despite rapid development on the outside. But perhaps in fifty years, the promises of One World, One Dream will finally come true.

Yes, I finally watched the Olympics opening ceremony, which I missed on the 8th August due to some business I had to take care of. I have to say, though, that I felt so proud after seeing the ceremony. It was an NBC rip with American hosts, but even they admired the show.

By the way, I think I won't be uploading any photos from my National Holiday travels until I get back to Beijing (that's Oct. 5th). I just can't be bothered to set up Internet connection to my laptop.

A little bit of this and that

Hmm, lots of stuff to write about, let's see where to start. Ok, school first. My home uni (HSE) put some tough requirements for outbound exchange students, so I'm taking a total of seven courses for this semester. Quite stupidly, as an undergrad student, I'm not able to take Chinese (Mandarin) language courses for credit. They are only for the MBA students.

Luckily there's a add/drop period in which students can try different courses. I pre-registered a course called "Commercial Bank Management". Sounds fairly easy, huh? But it was actually an "Economics of Banking" course, with loads of maths. But Chinese people are quite smart. As Bagher (the other exchange from HSE) said, even the most beautiful girls are smart (there's no trade-off) and even not bitchy. Well, another friend of mine would disagree on the last part, but let's just leave it at that.

Yeah, back to the topic: I'm changing the math-happy course to something more relaxed but overall the courses are okay. Some teachers are more open to the idea of speaking English, some are less. The extreme case was one course where the teacher would repeat the English part in Mandarin just to make sure all the Chinese people understand it. However, the same course is also the easiest to pass, because there's no final exam for foreigners. Communication with the locals is quite easy since most people speak English from good to well. On one course, I'm doing teamwork in a team of 2 exchange students (another one is a Thai student from Erasmus Rotterdam) and 2 locals. So far the teamwork's been working well.

On Tuesday I visited the National Stadium, or commonly, the Bird's Nest. It's the main venue of the olympic and paralympic games. I went there with my cousin, and our tickets let us see some of the paralympic finals. For example, we saw China win in the Women's 4x100m wheelchair relays (just follow the Youtube links on the right side). Anyway, the Nest and its surroundings, including the National Aquatics Center (can't remember the common term... well, the water cube?). The whole place in night lightning just look so stunning and no photo from my camera would capture and do justice to the atmosphere. This one comes pretty close, though.

Yesterday I climbed the Great Wall with one of my new friends here (actually my mom's colleague's daughter from England). Anyways, we almost missed, being so late, every possible method of transportation to the Wall (the nearest accessible point about 50 km from Beijing). With a little bit of luck and extra money spent, we caught up with the rest of the tourist flow, though. There we climbed to one of the peak points for some of the most breathtaking view I've seen for a while. The sky was blue on that day, so it was perfect. I'm a bit lazy with the photos, so they'll be uploaded when I have time.

Today they lifted the even/odd day restriction on cars and you could feel it immediately. On my way to my relatives', I sat in the bus for over 2 and half hours. Of course the rain might've also have something to do with it. You can't sense the traffic in Tsinghua campus, though, because it's always so quiet and calm inside.

The national holidays (the holiday around independence day on Oct 1) will be soon, which means a pause of over a week to all the studying, which is like yay! I'm flying to Hangzhou to see my dad, who is working over there. Then we'll drive to Nanjing to see the rest of my dad's family. I'm hoping I'd see Wall-E at some point, been reading the reviews and just can't wait to see it.

I can only drive on every other day? I'll buy another car!

(Previously on Tiger Returns: I discussed the fact that vehicle restrictions are in place and that on odd days, only the cars with a license plate ending with an odd number are allowed to drive and vice versa, except for cabs which are allowed to drive always.)

In related to that topic, they are now contemplating whether to extend the restriction after 20th September. My cousin says they probably won't do it, because an interesting phenomenon has come from it.

They say that when they introduced the semi-"banning" of cars, they tried to encourage people to use public transportation instead of their own cars. However, as the price of the cars are so cheap nowadays, people just bought another car with a different ending to a license plate so that they can switch cars every day. And believe me, I've seen it: two identical cars, one with an odd number and another with an even number sitting next to each other.

Oh by the way, the gasoline is also cheap. Hooray. To hell with global warming when I can pwn the streets! ;P

Things will get better though, because regardless of the outcome on decision to lift the car restrictions, the olympic lanes will be freed. My cousin told me that now if a car is caught using the lane, the driver can get a roughly 1400 euro ticket + one week jail time. The horror!

First impressions

Hot! Gusts of warmth began immediately after stepping out the plane. In the afternoon heat, mercury rose up to 35 degrees celcius. Dang!

The first day is nover now and I've already spent over 1200 euros for administrative and registeration costs, paying for the room for 5 or 6 months in advance, for example, although they'll return the money for unused days when I check out at the end of my studies.

Lucky for me, I can speak a little Mandarin and understand most of what people say. I can imagine how it feels not being able to understand a thing. Saw a raggae-funk-soul-brotha from Namibia or somewhere looking pretty lost even with his local Chinese buddy / interpreter.

But hey, at least now I've got an apartment (roughly the same size and price than mine in Finland), Internet connection (not tested yet, might be slow, I'm at my cousin's place 512k broadband yay!), a campus dining card, and a Chinese prepaid mobile phone number. Ican still receive sms or calls for that matter on my Finnish number, but I still won't pick them up.

The first day also involved lots of "running around" in Tsinghua campus to get this and that. Good that my cousin who picked me from airport has a car and we were able to drive around campus area, though it's discouraged as most of the roads are blocked and only open to bikes. Speaking of them, I still have to get my hands on one of those...

Beijing is HUGE. But that wasn't a surprise :) Lots of driving to do, lots of places to go... My cousin's car licence plate ends with an odd number, which means that until September 20th or something she's not able to drive on even days (in relation with Olympic and Paralympic games). Despite that fact, the traffic during peak hours is still stiffy, and I can't imagine the situation when every car is allowed onto streets again. However, they now have these special olympic lanes reserved for olympic traffic, which will be freed when the car ban is lifted, that'll help the situation a bit. The other "relief" is that people use a lot of liberty in interpreting rules and thus traffic is more "elastic" if you may.

I'm dead tired now for all the running and stuff, need a good night's sleep!