Getting over homesickness

On Friday night, after the farewell banquet for David Gross (which I skipped because I was tired of feasts), I went out with Lisa, Wei, Xi, David, Aaron and Josh to a bar downtown on NanShan Lu. We took two cabs—Josh, Aaron, Xi and I in one, David, Lisa and Wei in the other. Their cabdriver said, “Why do you want to go to that bar?!? That’s where all the foreigners hang out.” Little did he know, Wei was his only true Chinese passenger.

We drank cheap beers, had tequila shots and cocktails. We danced on the tiny dance floor in front of the DJ. ( I accidently kicked his cord, causing the music to stop for a few seconds.) I had never seen most of them dance. I felt like I was knowing them better, dancing with them. It was so unpredictable. The faces people make. The way they move their bodies. It was glorious.

We wanted more dancing. Better dancing. We hopped in two more cabs (does that sounds expensive? Its not. The average cab ride costs 12 yuan which, split four ways, is literally American pocket change. This is decadance as I’ve never known before. We can be playboys and girls. But I digress.) and headed for Babyface, a club that Lisa had learned about from her foreigner friend. We walked in and the place was full of smoke (the fake kind) and loud electronic music and very cool looking people and bright, colored spotlights going this way and that. It felt too cool—like those places in New York that are way too expensive for me to ever feel comfortable in. The walls were decorated with back-lit brightly colored glass flowers (they sounds terrible but they were quite cool, with a capital C). It was too much. First my glasses fogged up from the smoke and heat. Then my eyes hurt as the spotlights landed on my poor little mole-retinas. So I grabbed a cab with everyone except Aaron and Lisa, who were determined to dance and drink and have a good time. And they did.

The next morning (well, noon-ish, really) I got up and went for a hike with David and Xi. The goal of the hike was to wear myself out and maybe see some temples. We set off to campus and climbed the familiar stairs up the hill behind the library on campus. The stairs lead up to a path that follows the ridge of the mountains, I mean hills, that would take at least eight hours to hike beginning to end. We did a section of it, about a third.

We were lucky—it was sunny but cool—perfect hiking weather. We got good and hot going up a hill, would take off our coats at the top, then get really cold going down and would put them back on. Repeat. We walked along the stone paved path, passing groups of hikers constantly (one is never alone here).

Here is a view of West Lake from the hills.

It really was sunny, I promise. What you’re seeing is haze/pollution. I haven’t seen the horizon since I’ve been in China. It feel like I’m in Narnia, unsure of what would happen if I were to walk off the end of the world. I have no idea what is out there.

Do you see that little tower at the top of that hill? That’s where we ended up after about three hours of hiking. That’s Northern Peak (Bei3 Gao1feng1) and that tower is actually a cable car. There is also a little temple there. We could hear the gong through the trees as we approached. We paid our 5 yuan entrance fee and had a look.

I have no idea what it is called. Lonely Planet has ignored it, which is understandable—it is dirty and kind of cheesy.



If anyone knows who these deities are, please let me know. (I encourage you, in general, to leave Comments on my blog!)




I think this is the goddess of mercy (whom I had met already in Japan.)

Maybe the other deities are also her…

This, in another building, is a famous General. Xi said that he is red because he is born that way. We’re not sure why the other guy is purple but the sword thingy he carried was apparently too heavy for ordinary warriors to use.


And, in the third building was a god who is supposed to help you get rich, but only in ways where you use your brain. (“Like stock tips?” asked David. “No, like scholarships.” Replied Xi.)


We ate tea boiled eggs (yummy!) in front of a poem that Chairman Mao wrote (but we couldn’t read because of his calligraphy) and then walked down the mountain.



Going down the path, we ended up at a second temple (Taoguang or maybe Yongfu). We had the choice of paying 25 yuan to enter or of hiking back the way we came. I insisted that we see the temple. Poor Xi—he seemed bored.









I dragged them through every structure there—to the little cave where people washed with the drip water, to the little shrines where you leave oranges and jiao (10 jiao = 1 yuan) for the diety. Finally we got through the temple (which are much dirtier, more crowded and less well kept than those I saw in Kamakura in Japan) and continued down the mountain.

I have a question for you: how does bamboo grow. Does it get thicker like regular trees? Does it grow from the inside out? Or does it just get taller? Is there any correlation between bamboo diameter and age? The bamboo forest we walked through had thicker bamboo than the botanical garden so we pondered such questions.


I like old things, structures that are falling down. Wei says that things that are useless are beautiful.


At the bottom of the mountain, we hit Lingyin Si (2,3,4) (Lingyin Temple).

There was an enormous crowd at the gate. (This temple is mentioned in Lonely Planet) The complex looks big and we were running short on time—the guys had a dinner engagement. And it was 25 more yuan to get in and we were running short on cash. So we decided to take a raincheck on this temple—save it for a weekday when we have more time—and explored the grounds outside the temple instead.


Check out this rock. Does that not make you drool?


We climbed up a little hill covered in boulders, to find booths selling bracelets and sodas at the top. Oh, and a boulder that I think looks like a lions head


We hiked back down the hill and along some (slippery!) obsidian steps to an area where the rock face is covered in carved out life size statues.



We found a cave--Longhong Cave (Dragon Pool Cave)


(the camera’s flash has filled in what I couldn’t see in the dark)
A sign on the other side informed us that it is also called the Cave of the Goddess of Mercy or the Cave of Leading to the Sky (for the light shaft, probably). The stone carvings are from the Song Dynasty.



Can anybody read this?


By this point, we had to get going. I’ll have to go back sometime to find out what this is all about:

Famous People

Even though I was bummed out and blog-less last week (sorry!), I didn’t stay home the entire time. So now I have to catch up on all my stories. Plus it’s a way to procrastinate my TASI application and the calculation I promised I’d do.

Last week Professor David Gross was in town visiting us. David Gross won the Nobel Prize last year in Physics for the work he did with Frank Wiczek(who is Ari's advisor at MIT and whose daughter was in my ceramics class) and David Politzer on Asymptotic Freedom and Quantum Field Theory. This is not something that I would get too excited about—I meet professors frequently and Nobel Prize winners, although brilliant, are often just as brilliant as other professors and somehow got lucky on their projects. Also, it is rare for someone in High Energy Theoretical Physics to win a Nobel Prize so there are a lot of phenomenal people who are, sadly, prize-less.

But the Chinese love teachers, especially professors, and especially ones with Nobel Prizes.

On Tuesday morning of last week, David Gross gave the first lecture of the String Theory course we will be teaching here in the next eight weeks. Photographers and journalists crowded in front of his podium, walking around searching for the perfect shot while he, no longer visible to the audience, tried (with difficulty due to the distractions) to give a lecture on why we need String Theory.

We grabbed the last seats that were available, which were in the front row.

Notice how we’re wearing our coats. Its cold. Even though we are indoors it is cold.

As a Teaching Fellow at Harvard, where I am required to attend lectures on material I already know very well. To stay awake I’ve developed a habit of knitting. I knit during class. I knit during movies. I knit during seminars. I knit during Nobel Prize winners’ lectures. Because I do this, my loved ones receive warm, colorful, misshapen birthday and Christmas presents that I’m sure they cherish. (They’d better!)

Anyhow, after the lecture we all met up in Andy’s office to go out for lunch. When Andy introduced me to David Gross, he said “Oh. You’re the knitter!” Did I just throw away an opportunity for a post-doc at sunny, warm, rock-happy UCSB? I blushed. I asked if it bothered him. “No,” he said, “ I don’t mind.”

Walking over to lunch, I asked David how he likes being famous. He sucked on his cigar and replied, “I’m still the same person. But people treat me differently, even people I’ve known for a long time.”

We all went to lunch and I ended up a professor sandwich, between Andy and David. We talked about the thing that String Theorists usually talk about when they eat together—they gossip about other String Theorist. (Unless they are all grad students, in which case they also talk about sex.) I learned such wonderfully useless (yet delicious) information such as how Ed Witten got into grad school.

And no, I did not try the squid, because I didn’t know what it was (a strange fruit perhaps?) and was too shy to ask anyone or risk it not being fruit while sitting in that professor sandwich. (A week earlier, I had caused an entire table to roar in laughter at lunch watching me try jellyfish for the first time. No, I do not like jellyfish. It is both too chewy and too crunchy for my tastes.)

On Wednesday night (which was the Lantern festival, which we missed, which marked the end of the New Years Holidays and the almost-end of the morning fireworks), we gathered at Andy’s house for a party in honor of some linear combination of David Gross's visit and Andy’s daughter’s birthday. We brought a cake but we also found out what kind of cake David like.

Andy’s driver, Lou Ing, spent the day hanging out with Aaron and cooking up a storm. (She’s on the right.)

This is only about half of what she made.

We ate a lot, drank a lot, and then people set off fireworks. Josh and David (Shih) took all of these photos. I was hiding behind a large tree. (Katy—remember that time in high school when we set off fireworks on Bear Skin Neck in Rockport and it exploded in my hand and we ran from the police [or at least though we did] and repaired my hand in the ice cream shop? Well, between that and the recent sparkler induced hair-fire I wasn’t going to go anywhere near those things!)

See the large firework on the bottom of Lisa’s stack? That cost about $10.

And here is a nice portrait of David Gross:




I went in the house when people started doing this:

After the fireworks, Lou Ing brought out hot glutonous rice balls with sesame filling. These things are tasty.

My concentration in the photo is due to (1) inebriation and (2) I’m still learning to use chopsticks. (I’ve stained all my clothes with dropped food. Chinese food tends to be slippery. And my hands like to cramp up at critical moments.)

There were essentially two camps at the party—the grown-ups (professors, their families, etc) and the grad students. Among the grad students were the Harvard folks and the Chinese math kids. In China, students, even grad students, are treated like second class citizens--and in a very different way than they are in America. For example—they sleep 4-8 students per dorm room with no heat. The professors seem to ignore them. And so they keep to themselves. I talked to them a bit but the conversations kept degenerating into Chinese (why, oh why, did I drop Chinese Ba?!?) so I challenged Xi to an arm wrestling match. (Did I mention that I was drunk? In case you don’t know him, Xi is 21 years old and works out. A lot.) My challenge attracted the attention of Andy who, with a large crowd of people, followed us into the kitchen. An arm wrestling tournament ensues. (Its too bad that David Gross went home. It would’ve been fun to challenge him. With his cigar smoking I might’ve had a chance.)


“You cannot graduate until you beat me.”





(Yeah, I am using two hands. I am drunk. And weak—its been a month since I’ve climbed or lifted anything heavier than Polchinki. And, even with two hands, I lost.)
A line-up of about twenty people finally managed to tire Xi out

and we went through a half-dozen “Champions” who would arm wrestle a line of people until they got worn out and lost.



Andy and David were busy with lectures and reporters so, for the rest of the week, we (the grad students) were pretty much left to our own devices.

Coming soon: Temples, physics, novels and PIZZA