Dalian!

After bidding farewell to my family in Shanghai, I hopped on a plane to Dalian, where I will spend the next month with my team as "technical ambassadors" to the Dalian University of Technology on the iLabs project. We will also be teaching a condensed version of 6.001 and 6.002 to some students here.

The plane ride was uneventful. I again missed my opportunity to snap picture of the pretty flight attendants, who wore fancy pencil skirts with stripes in several shades of fuchsia. At the end of the flight, a recorded Chinese announcer in a pleasant female voice told the passengers that China Southern Airlines wished to forever be their friend. The corresponding English announcement merely hoped that the passengers had a good flight.

After brief waiting at the airport, I met up with the DUT people, who took me to my new residence in the building for "foreign specialists". My room is nice enough considering I'm living here for free. Its size is comparable to that of a large room in EC, its cleanliness as well. I have a TV, air conditioning, and slightly unreliable internet through an ethernet cord. I also have my own bathroom with a non-squatting toilet (joy!).

Food is completely covered as well, as long as I eat from their cafeteria. The cafeteria offers a dizzying variety of dishes whose quality is only slightly worse than an average day of home cooking. So far, my meals have come out to around $1.50 each. My one complaint is the lack of napkins anywhere in the cafeteria. Sure, Chinese people eat with chopsticks and very little food gets on the hands, but sometimes, it still happens. Also, many people eat watermelon at the cafeteria. I don't know how anyone can eat slices of watermelon without getting juice on their fingertips. I pretend to myself that everyone washes their hands immediately after eating, but I'm sure that's not really the case...

This morning, I walked around the campus and the surrounding areas for a bit. In an attempt to appear more "Chinese", I had my umbrella out even though it was completely sunny outside because Chinese women always carry umbrellas to block the sun. Even so, I felt like I stood out like a sore thumb. Dalian is much more "Chinese" than Shanghai, or rather, DUT and its surrounding areas are much more Chinese than the commercial districts and tourist attractions of Shanghai. I don't even know how to explain it, but today more than any time in the past week, I felt the huge difference in culture and lifestyle between me and those around me. Perhaps some pictures can explain better than words.

On-campus photos (The actual campus is a lot greener than these photos suggest. I only now realized that I failed to take pictures of the pretty greenery):

A giant statue of Mao. According to the guy who picked me up and gave me a brief tour yesterday, a giant statue of Mao is an essential part of Chinese universities.

The gym (which looks like an exploded Kresge) and stadium. Over to the far right, you can see the building where I'm staying. It's small and orange.

A vegetable garden next to somebody's residence.
I have no idea why there's a vegetable garden on campus.

Some signs with anime characters. They say inspirational things in Chinese.
There are cheesy inspirational signs everywhere. Most of them are white text on red banners reminding students to fendo ("struggle") to achieve and whatnot.

The Daheilou, or "big black building". It houses their version of CSAIL and applied math. Apparently, their computational geometry group is in there.
Note the mountain in the background.

Surrounding area photos:

A street near the student dormitories. It has way far too many different barber shops for any of them to be able to make a nice profit.

A view of the road separating main campus from the student dorms taken from the pedestrian bridge. Note the mountains in the background.

A street full of fruit vendors next to the student dormitories. Apparently, cherries are in season. One of these days (when I remember not to stuff myself silly in the cafeteria), I will buy some and practice tying the stems with my tongue.

In the afternoon, I went swimming in the pool next to my residence, during which time I realized that I cannot swim more than 50 meters without a break to save my life. I flopped around in the water for a little over an hour, swimming several feet at a time. It would have been fun had the water not been so cold and had there been less people. Still, at least I got some exercise, if swimming back and forth 5 meters at a time and gasping for breath every 5 seconds counts as exercise. Speaking of exercise, the students here love exercising. Outside the stadium, there's a big red sign that translates to "10 minutes of exercise a day, 50 years of healthy living" (I might have gotten the numbers wrong. I'll check tomorrow).

The women's locker room at the pool was a lesbian's paradise (if only China had more open lesibians...). I've never seen so many naked women in my life. The locker room had a public shower. No stalls, just a partition of the room with a bunch of shower heads attached to the perimeter walls. For a nation famous for sexual prudishness, these girls were surprisingly comfortable with nudity. Nobody seemed to care at all that everyone was naked. I, on the other hand, did not feel at ease taking a group shower even though my bikini was probably the most revealing bathing suit in the entire pool (most girls wore one-piece suits with a skirt).

No, I did not take pictures of the women's locker room, but here are some miscellaneous photos that might be of interest:

Remember the mountain behind the big black building?
I attempted to climb it until I realized I was wearing plastic sandals. Here's me in the forest going up the mountain. I'm getting pretty adept at auto-photo-taking.

3 wheeled car! These are all over the streets outside of campus.

Magpies. They're called "happiness birds" in English.
Apparently, DUT is full of them.
You can't tell from this picture, but happiness birds are quite large,
bigger than pigeons but skinner.

Interesting road sign.
I almost got hit by a car trying to take this picture in the middle of the street.
No, no, get your mind out of the gutters.