Missing Shades of Grue

Thursday was our last day for exploring Beijing. Unfortunately James fell ill and decided to stay at the hotel for rest. Kevin had a brief meeting across town with an international student recruiting agency for NKU. So after an early stop at a nearby Starbucks I headed out alone for the Temple of Heaven, which was only about a twenty minute walk south of our hotel. Spread out over a beautiful inner-city park were the Hall of Prayer, the Imperial Vault and a Circular Mound Alter. A few too many tourists for me but the architecture was spectacular and the grounds beautiful. I walked around for nearly ninety minutes, visiting all the main attractions and then leaving the main path for the more quiet gardens on the periphery. A very pleasant morning. On the way home I passed a guy flying a kite on an overpass. He wanted me to buy a kite, I suspect, but I only wanted the photograph.

Kevin and I met up in the early afternoon, worked on INF 128 a little, and then headed out to the Forbidden City. We walked from our hotel about half an hour to Tiananmen Square, which is the large people's plaza, which sits outside the Outer Court, which sits south of the Inner Court. There are lots of very elaborate (and beautiful) gates to mark your progress. Walking the entire stretch you travel from a massive public meeting space to a massive private forbidden space. And then you have an ice cream. It all makes sense. Inspiring, but refreshing, too. The Forbidden City was amazingly quite accommodating to tourists, though you won't find a Starbucks there anymore. At the north end of the property lies Jingshan Hill, a man-made mound of dirt that offers an awesome view of the center of the world.

We left the Forbidden City around rush hour, and rather than struggle with crowded public transportation or stand-still taxis, we decided to walk home. It was a great walk but long and exhausting. As per usual it was hot and muggy and though I was born in the year of the chicken, I was sweating like someone who was born in the year of the pig. I guess I walked about 15 miles Thursday.

James was still not feeling well, so Kevin and I took a taxi to a recommended Mongollian Hot Pot restaurant south of the hotel. Like a fondue, thin slices of beef and mutton and pieces of vegetable are dropped briefly into a pot of boiling seasoned broth and then dipped in a brown sauce. This may be my new favorite Chinese food.

We left the hotel at 5 AM Friday, beginning what was to be a twenty-six-hour day of travel, including a 6-hour layover in SEA. I didn't think you could get 26 hours in a day but we arrived at CVG around 7 PM, also on Friday. It's quite disorienting, really. We had been experiencing life in the future as Beijing was 12 hours ahead of Cincinnati. While I was enjoying a beer at the end of the day, my NKU colleagues were only beginning to start the same day. From that perspective I could easily forecast that my day would be more fun than their's. The trip back to KY not only brought us back to the same time eventually, but somewhere over the Pacific we were thrust into the past. Landing in Seattle we were suddenly three hours behind our colleagues. Where does the time go?

*Thanks to Miranda for this last photo at the Great Wall.

Tuesday was our first post-conference day. James and I checked out of the business hotel early in the morning and, though we had carefully worked the Chinese translation for "Can I check out now and store my bags until 2:00?", we carried our baggage over to Kevin's room at the RuYi hotel, which had a much later check out time. On the advice and with the help of Yang and her husband we took the number 374 bus to the Summer Palace in the morning. The half hour bus ride revealed a wonderful slice of Beijing life. Bustling, smoggy, chaotic, routine; lots of bicycles and street vendors and buses and, well, people scurrying here and there. There was a lot of scurrying going on. The most futile thing you can do in Beijing is try to catch a taxi; the most dangerous thing you can do in Beijing is try to cross the street. It's quite challenging and demands resolve, courage, timing, stupidity and luck. I wouldn't try this at home; but then again, I wouldn't have to.

You can't visit a foreign country without visiting a Palace or two. Beijing's Summer Palace is among the most beautiful I've visited. It's situated on a large lake with an island perfect for a temple and concession stands. We walked the bridge to the island, though we realized that real tourists take the boat over and back . It was another hot and muggy day but otherwise the weather was fine. We stopped for ice cream bars in response to the heat and I came to realize that ice cream had suddenly become my new favorite Chinese food. Largely because it required only one stick to eat, but it was cold and refreshing, too. We spent a few hours walking the grounds and climbing to the Palace itself, which is built into the side of a hill. Highlights included beautiful breezes at the top and a great view of the lake, filled with tourists taking boats to the island, where they found more tourists taking boats back from the island.

We returned to the hotel mid-afternoon and freshened up. We didn't meet up with our colleagues for Peking Duck as we had planned, but we did walk around the shopping district and found a Chinese restaurant. Reading a menu was a challenge without a native speaker and we were discouraged when the servers all laughed at our order--in fact, they sent over other servers to read our order and laugh. (Beer was a safe choice, I thought.) But we were happy with the results. Personally I think they were just laughing at us. I understand that.

We were up early on Wednesday to catch a taxi back to RuYi where we met up with Yang and her husband for a traditional Chinese breakfast consisting of a tofu/bean curd dish with sugar, soup, a fried bread and both meat and vegetable dumplings. We sat outside at a local noodle restaurant and talked for over an hour. It was quite a large breakfast, and it sustained us for the most of rest of the rest of the day. Once again Yang came to our rescue by calling the concierge at our hotel to have the van, which was to take us to the Great Wall that day, meet us at the RuYI hotel, rather then force us to take the nightmarish taxi ride back the the Merriott as originally planned. Knowing someone who speaks Chinese has made the whole trip go more smoothly and Yang has been exceptionally generous in helping us out. Though her background is electrical engineering, she's become interested in philosophy, particularly concerning the nature of information and quantum mechanics. Her adviser, unfortunately, is a Marxist social philosopher with little interest in philosophy and science. It was nice to talk a little philosophy with an enthusiastic graduate student.

Miranda, a graduate student in informatics, studying in Sweden but originally from Kosovo, joined us for breakfast and our trip to the Great Wall. We hired a van driver and guide for the day, which turned out to be a very smart move. We started with the Ming Tombs where we let our guide walk us through the grounds on a beautiful, crowdless day. Turns out Chinese only visit the Tombs in the morning before lunch, so by 11 am--the time of our arrival and the traditional start of lunchtime, there were few tourists. It is also good luck to arrive before noon we learned (something about evil spirits sleeping in late and so not being around to mess with you in the morning). After our large breakfast, lunch was a fresh peach. A Chinese peach!

We decided not to go to the typical tourist-infested Badaling section of the Wall and instead drove to the less-traveled Mutianyu section. Another brilliant decision. The ninety minute drive itself trough the mountainous countryside was fantastic with great vistas and a genuine glimpse of rural life outside Beijing. We took a sky lift up to the wall itself and walked for about two hours. The crowds were so thin we virtually had the Wall to ourselves. (We did meet a couple of Zoroastrians from India, but that's another blog post.) It was hot and muggy and quite a climb, but the experience was overwhelming. We would climb/walk for a stretch of the wall and then pause to "reflect" in the breeze of the shaded guardhouses every ten minutes. After an hour's hike along the Wall, stopping every three minutes to take yet another breathtaking photo of the grandeur of the Wall and the surrounding mountains, we headed back to our starting point, where we were to take the alpine slide down to the parking lot. You would think that walking on a wall one could not get lost, but that is exactly what we did, walking right past the point from which we started and becoming utterly confused about how to get off. Two computer scientists, and informaticist, and a philosopher--lost on the Great Wall of China. At times like these you would be inclined to blame the philosopher, and you would be right to do so.

We returned to Beijing, stopping for a tea ceremony carefully designed to make you buy lots of tea to take back with you. It worked. We were back to the hotel at seven in the evening, decompressed for 15 minutes, and headed out for Peking Duck. We tried to find a Peking Duck restaurant the night before, following the directions of our concierge, but we ended up in a mall food court. Thinking that was a cruel joke, we that night walked the streets to find a better option (see above). This night, with directions clarified, we found the restaurant (in the mall but next to the food court) and enjoyed--really enjoyed--Peking Duck as only American tourists can. Peking Duck is my new favorite Chinese food.

Our paper, "The Great Chains of Computing: Informatics at Multiple Scales," was on the schedule Monday morning. Kevin delivered the 20 minute talk while James and I sat in the audience, keeping track of the time for Kevin and applauding enthusiastically every time he mentioned the word "Informatics." The overall reaction was very positive. Props to Kevin for giving the best presentation of the conference. Clear, articulate and on time. Being on time alone should warrant a special award. He should receive another special award for the rare presentation that didn't resort to reading directly from the PowerPoint slides.

In America we eat with small shovels. Sometimes we just pick up the whole damn cheeseburger and stuff it in out mouths. In China, I observe, they eat with sticks. Yes, sticks. Eating with sticks is widely regarded as a good way to limit the quantity of your food intake. You avoid even more calories if, like me, you refuse to eat things with the heads still attached. Later today, however, I will violate all my own rules by trying the Peking Duck.

NOTE: I discovered that Peking Duck is not served with the head or any bones.

China. A country with a population of over 1.3 billion people. So far I've counted only a few million, but that was mostly in the hotel and around the conference site. Later today we head for the heart of Beijing, when we switch hotels. We also plan to visit the Beijing Summer Palace in the morning.

Does anyone know the pantomime hand gestures for "We are checking out tomorrow morning at 10 AM. Can we leave our luggage here until 2 PM?" No? We didn't either, and surprisingly the small Chinese-English translation iPhone app I downloaded last week wasn't much help. I know the international gesture for "luggage" and "2" but that didn't seem to carry enough information to make our point. (I think I'll use two additional pieces of luggage I inadvertently purchased to carry home more souvenirs.) We'll try again this morning, when we check out, hoping there is an English speaking desk clerk. I might also check Google for a translation. Ironic, isn't it?

More to come.

Following what seemed like an eternity of welcoming remarks and opening ceremonies, the conference began with a number of keynote speakers. Some were actually quite good, like Ben Goertzel's talk on Artificial General Intelligence and Paul Rosenbloom's "Towards a New Generation of Cognitive Architectures." Both speakers were brought in for the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ICAI), part of the Multi-Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MCAI), which includes the Foundations of Information Science (FIS). I also enjoyed Pablo Marijuan's FIS talk on the Information Needs and Signaling Resources of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Our paper is on the FIS schedule for tomorrow morning.

Repeatedly the presence of two Russian scholars was brought to our attention, several times by the Russian scholars themselves. They are not real Russians, mind you, but cartoon Russians, built from the stereotypical characteristics of Brezhnev-era academic elites and Boris Yeltson look-alikes. I don't like sounding prejudiced, but they didn't have to wear those suits and cut in the lunch line like they did. I'm not alone in feeling this way.

By mid-afternoon, the sessions were running about an hour over time and technological foul-ups were becoming more frequent, so I cut out a little early to catch a nap and get some work done in the hotel room (mostly I wanted a nap). Already very bored with the monotone food in the cafeteria, I stopped by the Wu-Mart on the way back and picked up some yoghurt and bread for diner. Yes, there really is a Wu-Mart. From the outside it looks like a one-room street-side grocery story with a few shelves of canned goods and racks of beef jerky, but walk in and you find a two-floor supermarket with fresh produce, baked goods, clothes and cheap jewelry. A Walmart, but with character.

We never did figure out how our hotel reservations got screwed up. Fortunately we will not be living in cardboard boxes on Tiananmen Square as we initially feared. The conference folks are putting Kevin up in the original RuYi hotel for free for a couple of nights since he's one of the session chairs. James and I signed on for a couple more nights at the hotel down the street. The plan is to move into a more tourist-friendly hotel downtown for the last few days when the conference is over.

We spent a good part of the morning straightening out the hotel situation, then a long walk in the rain not finding a "nearby" coffee shop someone recommended, then a longer walk in the rain (pouring rain, I want to emphasize) trying to find the University that is hosting the conference. We eventually stumbled upon it, drifting aimlessly until we found the registration desk, where we were informed that James and I had yet to pay the registration fee. We sent them credit card information months ago as requested, but they waited until today (when we were in our wet clothes and well into the morning without coffee) to tell us that they can't accept credit card payments. Cash Only! We had already given all our cash to the hotel because they, too, don't take credit cards. What kind of capitalistic communist country is this that doesn't take credit cards? So you, China, think you can be #2 in the world economy? A very kind woman offers to take us to a nearby bank where they don't take MasterCard but do have an ATM that acknowledges 5/3 bank cards. Success! Sadly I wondered whether this might not be the same person who should have told us months ago that they don't accept credit card payments; okay, at the time I wanted to ring someone's neck, but she was so sweet and helpful and apologetic I decided to have her stuffed and brought back to the US as a souvenir. She'll look so cute next to the wooden tortoise I brought back from the Galapagos last summer--provided I can get her through customs. NOTE: On second thought, while having her stuffed would preserve her cuteness, it would destroy her autonomy, and I can't be responsible for that.

Now for a post-lunch nap (it's 2:30 am in KY) and then off to a reception that I expect to resemble something from a Marx Brothers movie.