It's warming up nicely and my apartment no longer feels like an ice box. It is however still a lot cooler than outside which means that every time I step out of the door I'm bathed in the balmy, slightly breezy air which has settled over the city.

It's been a great weekend, meeting some new friends and finding a few new treats about the place.

During the week I met a Canadian guy in the local campus store. This is a pretty big deal as in the year that he's been here I'm the first Westerner he's ever seen in the shop. We got chatting and it turns out he's a postdoc mathematician working on control theory, specifically related to motor control in the human body. Really, really interesting stuff so we met up over the weekend to chat branes and brains over a few beers. I'll try and formulate my thoughts at some point on the details of his work and write it up on here.

He's been here for a year and has a lot of great hints and warnings about life in China. I generally end up at the expat bars so it was great to head to a far more local place to sit in the noisy, smoky atmosphere over some 15p beers and lamb kebabs. Next to us was a table of late 20s Chinese men drinking beer, eating snacks and generally getting pretty merry. It turned out that they are from the CAS campus too. Towards the end of the evening we got chatting and when I mentioned that I too was from the CAS they laughed and said that of course, they new that. I am it appears a famous face on the campus and I hope that my celebrity is simply a matter of being exceptionally tall and white. It's a strange feeling and though I get stared at every time I walk around the grounds I hadn't really taken on board that I was not only seen but noted.

Anyway, for now I must go meet up with friends for Sunday lunch at a local Muslim eatery but still to come is the last installment of the holiday and there are lots of physics things that I want to write about.