Dancers in Tian Tan

I bought the camera without any plans to use the video feature, but I played around with it a little in Tian Tan park last weekend and found the quality is absolutely breathtaking. The following, rather shakily taken footage (this is my first attempt at film making) was reduced by a huge factor to put on youtube, and the colours in the original are stunning. I may put up a higher definition version at some point.

I thought the whole thing was a rather lovely moment with some great expressions, both facial and through body language of people out for the day, to enjoy the weekend together in one of Beijing's most pleasant temples. Give it a moment for the second couple to come to the front

Three weeks in and extremely loud on the Eastern front

Blogging has been on the tips of my fingers for the last three weeks but time simply hasn't allowed. There's a critical point where the number of blogworthy events becomes so high that there's no time to blog about them as you're too busy doing them, and helping to run this conference while attending lectures, writing papers, organising lecture visits and showing people the wonders of Beijing has kicked us way into the criticical region. We've had some fantastic lectures and some wonderful evenings and now, three weeks into this eight week program, I'm feeling very happy with how it's going, even if I'm pretty exhausted. The highlight, in addition to meeting up with some old time collaborators and starting a load of new projects has been having the chance to show good friends around a city which I feel very comfortable in, and to see their impressions of China change from a scary, exotic unknown, to an exciting, inspiring place with so much to offer (we've seen everything from hardcore Beijing punk, to tango in the park, to Sichuan face changing, to kungfu in the early mornings to traditional singing in Tian Tan, and so much more).

So, given so little time (about to head out for another meal) I thought I'd update with a few photos from the 7D, which I'm extremely pleased with so far.

From the Forbidden city:

and Tiananmen. I love the little doll she's holding limply as the guards march by:

From Tian Tan, on a very smoggy day:

and a close up in Tian Tan:

and the soju bottles at the end of an evening in a Korean bar in Wudaokou:

There are a few more here, and plenty more to come.

Back in town

After a long trip (no extra leg-room on the flight from Doha to Beijing and so I had to stand up for most of the seven and a half hour trip) I arrived, heavy eyed, but excited to be back in Beijing. I was greeted with the heavy smog of a city of 14 million, and the smell and noise to match. Taking the bus from the airport to Zhongguang Cun and walking into the Chinese Academy of Sciences campus felt wonderfully familiar, even though it was the end of the national holiday when I arrived and so the place was deserted.

I took my key from the porter and made my way back to the same building that I lived for two years here, arriving fresh faced from my PhD five years ago. Nothing has changed, the jaozi stands are still there. The copy shops and the hordes of people playing games remain, the grandmothers taking babies for walks in split bottomed trousers (the babies, not grandmothers) are still as numerous as ever, the men, old and young hacking up big spots of phlegm on the sidewalk remain to keep the pavement from drying up, the smart shoed fruit salesmen still talk noisily on their cell phones and in the tennis courts next to my place there is still a group of people practicing tai qi though I have to see if the sword wielding grandmothers still come out in the early morning.

I'd been rather worried that I'd come back to find a post Olympic sanitised version of the city, but thankfully it's the old Beijing that I know and love - the buildings change, but the underlying feeling is exactly the same.

I'll be here for the next two months and I have to say, though I know from past experience that the stresses and chaos all get too much after a while, I'm enormously happy to be back!

AdS/CFT and novel approaches to hadron and heavy ion physics - Beijing KITPC program 2010 - an advert

While in Beijing for an academic visit in the summer of 2008 I spoke with my old boss and director of the KITPC, Yue-Liang Wu about the possibility of organising a program on an AdS/CFT related subject. I got the support of the director, got together a team of people for an organising committee (Stanley Brodsky, Nick Evans, Hong Liu, Craig Roberts, Dam Son, Xin-Nian Wang, Urs Wiedemann) and over the last year have been going through several stages of proposals before getting confirmation of support and the go ahead to start inviting people. We've been sending out invitation letters over the last couple of weeks and have a few people now confirmed internally (the names are only viewable currently to the organisers) and thought that now would be a good time to advertise via the blog.

The program will last for seven weeks from the 11th of October until the 3rd of December  2010 and we hope to get as many people interested in AdS/CFT applications to hadron and heavy-ion physics and those involved in these subjects from other perspectives to come along, collaborate, speak, and integrate their ideas in order to advance the field through interdisciplinary works. The idea is for people to come for at least two or three weeks in order that there time can be relaxed and there's plenty of opportunity to build up lasting collaborations.

One of the main problems of the field as I see it is that there are many groups trying to essentially deal with very similar questions but with such different languages that collaboration is often difficult. One of the aims of this program will be to give people the platform and time to reduce this difference and for ideas in diverse areas to be exchanged and discussed in a nice environment, with a good cross-section of international researchers.

The abstract of the program can be found here and I would highly recommend anybody interested in this field to apply to the program, to come and chat with a lot of like-minded people and to explore Beijing, a truly incredible city with a diversity of cuisine, history, language, music, art, architecture and nightlife unlike any I've experienced anywhere else in the world. I love this city, and am hugely looking forward to not only working with a lot of people on a fascinating topic in physics, but to sharing the city with many newcomers.

If you have any questions at all about the program then please ask and I will be happy either to answer directly, or to find out anything you need to know from the staff at the KITPC who are organising all the local details.

Beijing snapshot

The department is virtually empty at the moment, as is the city, and I'm working on a couple of papers which have been dragging on for way too long. The work itself is extremely interesting, but ironing out the numerical niceties is beginning to be rather tiresome. Sadly, without these niceties it's much harder to put across our results. Still, I've learned that motivation goes through surges and ebbs, and I'm not worried that the current situation isn't perfect for the work. We'll have these done soon enough and then be onto the next set of calculations...

In the mean time, to continue the updates from my journey:

On the day of the eclipse in Wuhan I headed to the train station, not knowing where I was heading next. I turned up, waited in the queue and pondered where to go. By the time I got to the front of the line I figured that I could just make it to Beijing and back to Shanghai in time to catch my flight which would give me a few days back home (Beijing home) to see friends and go check out some old haunts. It turned out that the only tickets left were for the next morning, which I took and booked myself into a cheap hotel close to the station. I spent a few hours wondering around Wuhan, reading in cafes and snacking on streetfood before heading back and catching my train the next morning.

Train rides in China are good for either practicing your Chinese or getting a good way through a thick book, but such options are exclusive and I ended up talking to those around me for the ten hours of the journey. I arrived in the evening and took the metro back to my old stomping ground and indeed my old building where I was staying with a friend. Plenty of old faces greeted me and I had a nice chat with the dumpling lady who was still there, still hand rolling the same flavours that had been there since I arrived four years ago, before heading up to meet old friends.

The three full days in Beijing passed very quickly but I had a chance to pop into the physics department and meet with the head of department, my old boss, about the program I'm organising for next year (more on this soon). I also met many of the graduate students I'd known before which is always a pleasure. It's good to see the progress they make when you come back only once a year.

On the second afternoon I walked up to the electronics district (Zhongguancun) to see if I could find a piece of kit for my camera. On the way I passed my favourite restaurant, a simple place with fantastic Hunan food: big fish head, mapo dofu, black bean bitter gourd and spicey pork dishes being some of the best I ever ate in China. Sadly my restaurant was no more and the dozen or so establishments which used to feed me most nights of the week along the same stretch had vanished, the space being readied for another anonymous block of high-rises.

Further along, where the demolition has not yet been felt I came across an English academy which I don't believe I'd seen before and one of the most ironic pieces of Chinglish I've had the pleasure of seeing:

Another piece of Chinglish I wish I'd had the piece of mind to photograph was no a T-shirt of a woman selling clothes on the streets of Wudaokou. The T-shirt was emblazoned with a Union Jack, under which in bold letters was written "New York, New York". Sometimes it's hard to tell how much of it is a double bluff. 

On arrival at zhongguancun it became clear that the item I wanted was out of my price range, but one of the enthusiastic salesmen wouldn't let me go before I gave him an hour's English lesson - I'm surprised that I haven't been barraged with e-mail questions from him since, though that may be because I recommended he make his way to Talenty English!

Anyway, after a few short days in Beijing I got back on the train and headed another ten hours down to Shanghai. This trip used to take 16 hours and within a year or so will take just four when a very high speed track (300km/h+) will be finished, linking the two East China hubs. A lot of Chinese infrastructure sure puts that of it's British and Spanish counterparts to shame, though the reasons behind such advances are simple and often sad.

Anyway, I should have the last instalment tomorrow night, and then we're back on dry land in not so sunny Spain.

The Beijing of Possibilities - A review

I met Jonathan Tel back in Beijing around three years ago when he came to research his latest book. He contacted me as an expat to discuss some of my views on life in the city and we met for a meal in a Hunan restaurant on the North side of Haouhai lake.We spent a few enjoyable hours talking string theory, writing, travel and food (in a past incarnation Jonathan had been heading the way of the theoretical physicist).

Shortly after this I read Freud's Alphabet, Jonathan's second novel, which I now realise never received the full review it deserved. It's a dream-like look at the last days of Freud's life and the playful language alters as Freud's state becomes ever more influenced by the cocktail of cancer and morphine. The book, split into 26 alphabetically ordered vistas is well worth a read, both for the word play and for the slightly Joycian stream of unconsciousness which takes you through the book via a series of chaotic passages in one inevitable direction.

But that's not what this review is about. I was lucky enough to get a copy of The Beijing of Possibilities a few weeks ago and the fact that it has taken me such a long time to write this is a sorry reflection of life over the last few months.

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Beijing is a land of unfinished stories. Every time you leave the flat you will see some loose thread of a scene which has a mystery behind it: the man wandering around in his pyjamas, the sullen girl at the bus-stop with empty eyes, the tattooed businessmen arguing at the table next to you, the Beijing goths in the I love kitty car. Everything has a back-story, but you are always left wandering.

When I met Jonathan back in Houhai he was researching the iceberg beneath the water that filled in the rest of these tales.The Beijing of possibilities is a book of short stories about the depth of Beijing life, mixed helplessly between ancient and modern, these are the windows into the split second pieces of action you see every day on the streets of any big city, but in Beijing more than any you know that the truth is much more interesting than what your imagination can muster.

The stories combine these events with ancient Chinese folktales to give a real sense of the Beijing which people who don't know the city well have real trouble understanding - the metropolis simply has too many layers of history, culture, pain and change to get a real idea of the diversity and complexity of life there, from the migrant workers to the modern couple living their dreams in a small Haidian apartment, from the factory worker to the opera librettist, Jonathan has captured the strange mix of brilliant colour with smudges of black and white without which it is impossible to think of Beijing.

In addition to the stories themselves, there is a more subtle play. Milan Kundera likes to put himself firmly in the middle of his stories, and sometimes you don't know on what level the narrator is with you as novel and commentary intertwine. Jonathan Tel pulls the opposite trick and sits in the shadows of his book making the pen seem to move without an author, and I have to say that I enjoyed this a lot. It influences the book only subtly but adds to it Jonathan's own style and character.

This book of short stories can be found at Amazon UK and Amazon US and I'd highly recommend it for anyone wants to see behind the door into the Beijing of possibilites.

See also the review at Timeout Beijing, where this was book of the month not long ago.

Always with the if onlys

I happened to stumble across an old post of mine, from back in the era of cold Beijing nights and surreal days which promised the unexpected around every corner. I've been away from there for over a year now, but it stays in your blood - everyone I know who has spent serious time there attests to this. The feelings of true love for that city are those of a stormy relationship, with highs and lows which even in retrospect bring back vivid feelings of elation and desolation.

In fact it wasn't the content of this particular post that I was reading, written around two years ago which caught my attention, but a little twang of nostalgia for the days that I took great pride in sculpting a post, paying attention to the flow and rhythm of every sentence and, on occasion if I was very lucky, causing others to comment that they had enjoyed the insights, the weirdness, the humour, or simply the string of words.

These days I'm busy, really really busy. I've had to slow down the social activities a little as I've turned my days inside out. Spending time in the office in the day and the library at night, reading the piles of papers that await my attention does not make for a very sociable timetable. I'm learning, I'm playing with new tools and ideas, and I'm enjoying it a lot, I would even go so far to say that I feel a current boost of creativity. But still the call of the open road was brought to my attention by the piece of writing that I put forth not so many moons ago.

Anyway, despite the momentum of work which I've promised myself will go on for the next couple of months at least - provided I don't burn out, I do feel the need to explore. Once again I'm feeling a little hemmed in by this beautiful, but undeniably small city. I want to get out at the weekends occasionally for an adventure, and though I enjoy my weekend trips to the local cafe where I continue with work, somehow I'm not feeling fulfilled by the current balance. It's a difficult balance to strike however, and the guilt and drive of wanting to get the work done must be carefully offset against my natural need for new stimuli.

Anyway, this Sunday I'll be heading to Madrid for the AdS collective at the beginning of next week, so I'm not going to be able to escape this time. However, I'll see what I can cook up for the coming weekends and hopefully look to post something more in line with what I have always envisioned this blog to be about.

Year on year

My Mathematica programs are biting back today and undocumented interpolationpoints commands are laughing at me every time I turn away. Still, answers are converging in hoped for directions and all should be well soon.

Anyway, I haven't had a chance to write up much more about my trip to Porto, but I will put up a couple more photos from this splendid city.

On the Sunday as I walked around the city with some friends from Couchsurfing, and waited for my midnight bus, I had a chance to go to a few wonderful viewing areas to see the city as the sun was setting. In particular the rather charming Crystal Palace gardens (no longer with a Crystal Palace, but a somewhat less attractive auditorium) gives a great view over the river, with the Port Cellars peppering the opposite bank:

Further along the coast the scenery changes considerably and you get a real view of the ocean and the smell of the sea replaces the smell of ancient city life:

A few more photos to process at some point too, but they will have to wait.

Anyway, everything is busy as ever at the moment, with a short trip to Dublin to give a seminar in a couple of weeks, and a semi-public lecture on atmospheric optics to give at the beginning of December. I'll be heading to Madrid to give a talk at the Christmas meeting too, before heading back home for a few days over Christmas and the new year.

Today we had a fascinating talk on the use of Turing machines to study evolution and I spent lunch quizzing the speaker on many things which have been on my mind since the amazing talks by James Glazier on morphogenisis back in 2007 in Beijing.

On a side note, I've now been living outside China for almost exactly a year. I never imagined how much I would miss the place, and although I'm extremely happy here in Spain, in the department, in the city and in my current position, there is something unreplacable about life in that sprawling, dirty, glorious city of fourteen million, which is at the same time undescribable and unforgettable. I was hugely lucky to have the chance I had in China, and am equally lucky now to be here in Santiago, in a very different, but equally stimulating environment.

Anyway, Mathematica seems to be giving me better answers now, so I should get back to it...

The Englishman who went up a mountain and came down a mountain

So, I was up at 5.30 this morning to head to the mountain I was going to see the eclipse from. The eclipse was due at 10.24 according to the website I'd read it from. However, having made it to the top in reasonable time, 10.24 came and went, and the faint glow of the sun showed no signs of dimming.

Having just found an internet cafe I now see that very cleverly the time was quoted as UTC, not local time. I simply didn't consider that one would write an eclipse time in anything but local time! So, this means I have another 6 hours to wait, which may just give time for the clouds to move a little.

Still, I've seen a rather beautiful, sacred mountain this morning, with stunning panoramas, gorgeous pagodas, and piped music blasting out to remove any feelings of authenticity the place may once have had. That said it was stunning and I'm glad I  made the journey here, if only for that.

Off to read some papers now (no cafes here to work in, so I'll sit in the lobby of the hotel for a while) and will head out again later to try my luck once more. After this I have a four and a half hour train ride with no seat (all the seats were sold out by the time I arrived here and there was no way to book the ticket at my previous location). So, I'll be standing till around 1 in the morning, crash in a hotel for the night and then take off on another 16 hour train ride for Beijing tomorrow evening. Adventures, adventures!

Getting ready for the mystery trip

After a tiring couple of weeks giving talks I'm down with a bit of a lurgy, but resting up, ready for my big trip starting tomorrow. In preparation today I went to the electronics district in search of some special camera equipment. I managed a great deal on a simple tripod, but the second thing I was looking for didn't seem to be around. I was looking for a very very strong neutral density filter, something which would cut incoming light by around 100,000 times. This, sadly, the shop assistants simply didn't understand, and told me that a regular grade neutral density filter would be fine for my purposes, though I had expressly told them what I needed it for. I was not impressed! I do at least know a few more Chinese photography words.

So, tomorrow afternoon I head off on the 15 hour train ride to Baoji, China's 25th biggest city with a puny population of only 3.7 million. Currently I then plan to make my way to Kongtong shan near Pingliang, a sacred daoist mountain in Gansu province, where my prize may await me.

I've got a stack load of papers to keep me going through the train ride there and back (some time around the 2nd or 3rd of August) and plenty of pen and paper calculations which need to be done.

If it's not clear already, I will probably give the game away tomorrow.

Beijing car restrictions not helping the pollution levels

Well, at least that's the conclusion I make from looking at the sepa.gov official website here which monitors (certain) pollutant levels. Last Sunday a new scheme for car reduction was introduced pre-games which allows cars to go on the roads only on odd or even days, depending on the number plates. Since then, although the traffic has noticeably decreased, the pollution levels have been steadily rising. I created the following from the data on the above linked site (apologies for the mistake in the figure, API index should simply say API).

It's worth looking at this blog for a thorough discussion of what these levels mean, but given that the visibility must be down to a few hundred meters today, it is clear that the current levels are really not good. Taken directly from that blog is the following:

1 = API 0-50 = excellent (old) => good (new)
2 = API 51-100 = good => moderate
3A = API 101-150 = slightly polluted => unhealthy for sensitive groups
3B = API 151-200 = light polluted => unhealthy
4A = API 201-250 = moderate polluted => very unhealthy
4B = API 251-300 = moderate-heavy polluted => hazardous

And given that I've seen the levels get to 500 on very very bad days, 100 doesn't look too chokingly horrible, though I understand that it is outside the guidelines set by the Olympic committee. With less than two weeks to go, I'm not sure what more they can do...

Blogger still playing up!

Blogger is still playing up here in China - I had expected everything to be smooth here before the Games, but apparently not. Wordpress is completely out and the netnanny rears her ugly face at regular, though seemingly arbitrary intervals.

Anyway, I've just given my last talk here at the KITPC, a two hour talk to the students which was fun, as always. Tomorrow I have one more at IHEP and then I'm done for talks in China. Pretty tired after a two hour enjoyable ad-lib today. While the students do ask very good questions here, I feel relaxed talking to them, which definitely gives me good practice.

Anyway, my clue today for my magical mystery tour next week is that my first stop is going to be a small city in Shaanxi called Baoli. It'll take around 15 hours to get there by train.

And a photo from this weekend, reminding me that China is so constantly photogenic. Taken at Houhai lake while tucking into some spicy duck neck and chicken feet - beautiful!

Noctilucence

Just finished my fifth hour of talks this week, give or take. All fun, and more to do next week. In the mean time I'm rather looking forward to a break this weekend.

That said, Beijing is pretty much shutting down over the Olympic period with many of the best places simply closing for the next month. My old hangout D22 which has live music and movie nights had sudden licensing problems and is locked for the time being, while the clubs in the local student area are all closing for the next month and a bit. I'll try and head to the 798 art district this weekend if I can, as I'm hoping they won't have had sudden problems with the surprisingly political artworks on display.

In fact this is the tip of an iceberg which essentially means that many of the local residents of Beijing are feeling pretty peeved about the fact that the Games are coming to town (ok, most that I've spoken to). You ask them in a formal context what they think of the Olympics and you will find out that this will be a wonderful display of modern China to the rest of the world and a moment to be proud of, but you ask them in private and most of them are pretty tired of the armed guards on the streets, the extra security checks all over the place, the closing of many venues, the hike in prices and many other things besides. Many of my foreign friends here are having there lives even more disrupted by huge restrictions on the visa process. At least half of my friends here are having to leave the country in the next week or so, having to temporarily ditch their jobs and wait for things to ease up. Many of those who are staying are finding sudden, surprising increases in their rent which landlords apply unapologetically.

Anyway, enough on the negative side. I thought I'd post up another photo today, this one from my flight from Dusseldorf to Beijing last week. At around 4 in the morning, somewhere over Mongolia we had a wonderful display of noctilucent clouds. Clouds high in the atmosphere that even after sunset are still lit by the light shining from below the horizon. Their pattern and colour are very distinctive and are really quite stunning. The bright light in the middle is Jupiter. See more here for information about such cloud displays.

Back in the Wu

Somehow it feels like I never left. Everything here in Beijing feels so familiar. Stranglely the very fact that many things have changed feels familiar. You become used to the continuous dynamic of the buildings, the restaurants and bars, the flow of students in and out.

There's still building work going on at all hours of the day and night and despite the promises two years ago, the taxi drivers still don't have any English at all. It was said that during the Olympics, all taxi drivers had to obtain a minimum standard of English, but it seems that this idea has been dropped and foreign visitors coming to the games have been advised to only take taxis when they know exactly where they are going.

The weather has at least improved significantly from the first two days where the visibility was truly atrocious, and yesterday with temperatures around 35 degrees, we had a decent day of blue skies. Jet-lag was taking longer than expected so I crashed in the afternoon before going to catch up with some old friends in the evening.

Today I find myself in one of the same cafes I used to frequent where the coffee is strong (if not terribly tasty) and there is free wireless. Due, I believe, to a lack or regulatory enforcement, China is still the country with the most impressive wireless access I've ever seen, easily beating Japan, Korea and most of Western europe.

Today I'm attempting to finish writing a seminar I will be giving on Tuesday afternoon. This is one of the hardest seminars I've had to give. I will be talking about our latest paper on spectral functions in the quark gluon plasma form holography, which is something I talked about just last week in Munich. However, the Munich group has more string theorists per square inch than anywhere I've ever been, and a large number of them specialise in AdS/CFT. On Tuesday however I will be giving a talk at a conference on flavour physics, as an invited speaker. I've been to such conferences before and given overview talks on AdS/CFT, but to attempt to give a full-blown research seminar without losing everyone in the first few minutes is not an easy task! I'm going for lots of pictures and trying to repeat my main points in as many ways as possible without it becoming boring. Keeping this up for an hour and a half is going to be tricky...

It's going to be a learning experience for me at any rate. After this I'll be preparing a series of blackboard talks to a smaller group. This is all enjoyable, but means I can't concentrate on my research as much as I'd like right now. Still, I have scheduled a few discussion sessions with people here were I will find out what they've been up to since I was last here.

On a completely unrelated subject I'll leave you with a picture from the conference I went to a few weeks back in A Toxa, on heavy ion physics. A few of us went for a walk on our last day there. I waited back with another friend to take some photos and took this silhouette of multinational physicists disappearing into the sunset:


Anyway, better get back to generating graphics which will keep people on the ball!

Beijing, we have a problem!

Well, I'm back in Beijing, currently suffering from jet-lag having managed a grand total of an hour sleep on the flight here from Munich via Dusseldorf. I'll be spending a couple of weeks back at my old department and will give a series of talks here on various research directions.

It's great to be back in this hot, muggy, chaotic, dynamic city, but one thing is clear:

There is less than a month to go until the start of the Olympics and the pollution is utterly horrendous! I mean, really, about as bad as I've ever seen it! My throat is already burning from the smog, and with visibility down to around a kilometer when we landed this morning, you could immediately smell the concrete, acrid stench as the plane door opened.

I do still believe that they will have it sorted for the Olympics itself, with a combination of cutting cars and factories down in the next couple of weeks and the huge program of rain seeding which they used to great effect last year. However, as far as I'm aware, the athletes are going to be arriving here in the next couple of weeks and I don't believe the problem will be solved by then. They are clearly going to have a short-term solution to this vastly long term problem and even that is going to be cutting it fine. I can see some of the athletes simply landing, seeing the current situation and heading back home.

I spoke previously about how I believed China was the only nation who would be able to turn the situation around in such a short time, but that was when there was two years to deal with the problem, not four weeks...we'll have to see.

In the meantime I have to write my talks for here which I only found out about a couple of days ago, and have some sleep to be catching up with too!

Olympic Gold

Toomanytribbles has been shooting some amazing architecture photos in Beijing recently. I took this shot last year in Beijing of the Bird's nest Olympic Stadium:

Somehow it's taken on a rather more finished look which TMT captured in this stunning photo:

Check out more of her photos at her Flickr site here and on her blog here.

Net censorship to be removed - briefly

Yep, kind of inevitable. As I've said before, China and in particular Beijing is going to be a spotless paradise for the time around the Olympics after which the pollution will roll back and the net nanny will resume her duty. From the Peking Duck

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After the previous slightly low post I took myself off to a local Chinese restaurant where I was doted upon and made to feel much better. In the mood to tackle these problems now...

Bubbly goodness

A friend of mine in Beijing is employed in the great army of international experts working to make the 2008 Olympics run smoothly. It so happens that she also makes the occasional video of her travels around Beijing. This week she has been lucky enough to go to the stunning National Aquatic Centre - The Watercube, which is the largest ETFE (read plastic bubble) clad building in the world and stands next to the Bird's Nest. Here is her video composition:


(Via Toomanytribbles)

Beijing smoking

I've spoken many times about my love of Beijing. Sadly, these days she's a sick, sick city and I'm glad I'm not there. The API (pollution measure) which usually hovers around the 100-150 mark (compare with London which is rarely above 40 on the same scale) today hit 500 (which seems to be the top of the scale from what I can tell).

This is really serious for the inhabitants of the city. China has around 400,000 deaths directly related to pollution every year and I can't see that number lowering with the current trends. Beijing has just eight months to get its act together before the curtains open and everyone comes coughing and spluttering to the start line. I hope for everyone's sake that the media frenzy is enough to shame them into getting this sorted!

Beijing and beyond

I'm back from my travels about Southern China, feeling refreshed and raring to get back into work. There are a few things which come first though, including crossing continents. As I came back to this polluted, crowded, noisy place which I have called home for the last two years and will be calling home for another 36 hours or so, from the idylls of the South I had some time to reflect on the last two weeks and the last two years. Two years ago I could never imagine that it would be this difficult to say goodbye to China, but getting on the plane is not going to be easy. Nevertheless I am hugely looking forward to the new start in Spain which I'm sure has many things in store for me, both academically and culturally.

Anyway, there are a dozen blog posts buzzing round in my head at the moment since the last ten days traveling but as it's almost 1 am and I have my last day in the office tomorrow, these will have to wait. There's a lot to write in particular about Jiuzhaigou and I have at some point in the future to go through the 500 photos I took there but for now I shall just post one to show why this place is famed for being paradise on Earth:

Click for larger versions. Many more to come when time allows.