The week went buy in a blur. Heidi would teach from 8-10 then come back to the apt and would have some work to do but we’ve figured out that it’s best to go early to the cafeteria for lunch so we try to go around 11. Sometimes we have errands to run - the usual stuff, laundry, data for our phones, ATM, groceries… As for the afternoons, on Tuesdays Heidi has office hours so I go off and explore on my own and actually, this week we had stuff every other afternoon. Wednesday, we met with Prof Liu who is a collaborator of a professor I know from Queen’s. He showed us around the hydraulics building and the Mechanical Engineering building where his biomechanics lab is. It was all very impressive. The students showed us the projects they were working on which included studying back muscles while riding a horse and exoskeletons for legs, arms and hands. He also treated us to a fantastic dinner in a very cool restaurant. We went back to the restaurant with the other American professor and her family for lunch on Friday but seeing as the menu is all in Chinese we had a lot more troubles ordering and were only semi-successful. On Thursday we had the class tour of actuator motors. It was a very interesting tour. The owners are a husband (American) and wife (Chinese) and very progressive in their ideas. (Paul you’ll like this) They even tried setting up hydroponics on the roof with Tilapia to grow vegetables for the cafeteria – it’s standard in China for companies to provide 2 meals a day for the workers. The workers also work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. He said the workers aren’t always open to the changes he wants to make so it’s always a challenge. He gave an example of providing them with ergonomic mats to stand on and at first the workers didn’t like it but he convinced them to try it for a week. But then when he took it away after a week the workers came in and said – where is that rubber thing, I liked it. After the tour they treated us to a fantastic dinner.
We had a slow start on Friday (no classes on Fridays), it started with lunch, then we went in search of the Foreign Language Bookstore to find maps with English on them. We were successful in finding the maps and bonus – found latte’s and mango shakes as well. But then we went to get our bikes. When we bought our bikes we also bought very cheap locks ($3) – what’s that saying – you get what you paid for! Well, we couldn’t open my lock and we had very cleverly locked both bikes with it. We struggled with it for quite the while and then the security guard for the bookstore came out and gave it a try. He even disappeared at one point and came back with a pencil and scissors and tried shaving some graphite into it for lubrication. He gave it a valiant effort but finally admitted defeat as well. He then signed scissors and pointed down the street and around the corner. So off we went and sure enough a block over in a side street we found what looked like a mechanics toolbox and setup. It wasn’t a store by any means. It was all on the street. Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of the setup. Anyway, there was an old man there and we tried through pictures and hand motions to communicate that we needed a tool to cut our lock. He shook his hand and went into the “shop” where we discovered the mechanic and many other men were playing cards. I guess the mechanic had a good hand because he wasn’t willing to help us out. So we started looking further down the street but it soon became obvious that there was nothing further down so we headed back. I am guessing that other people thought he should help us because there was a commotion outside of the shop when we returned and they were excited that we were back and made the mechanic come out and help us. We showed him photos of our bikes locked together and we had brought Heidi’s lock with us and motioned cutting it. We must have gotten the message across because he pulled bolt cutters out of his toolbox to cheers from us. We then managed to convey that it wasn’t far away and he managed to convey that he wanted 30RMB ($6) and off we went back to the bikes and he cut the lock for us!
To be continued…
- I thought I had all evening to work on the blog but first I had troubles with my photo software and then sorted photos to upload, then we had a nice visit with a grad student, and somehow it’s now 11:30pm. Time for bed.
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