So wind-chill seems to be a big factor in Beijing. Without the wind, even the cool morning air feels wonderful once I am in the sun, but when the wind starts blowing, staying outside for long is unbearable early in the morning or late in the afternoon. There might have been a mini-duststorm that I missed out on laste night: I think I saw an unusually dusty and dirty sidewalk.

Enough about weather.

Pin will be home in QingDao (TsingTao, as in the beer) this weekend (he left yesterday evening). Lacking a buddy to bounce ideas and questions off of, I left the office relatively early last night (around 9:30pm).

It was cold out, and the streets were relatively empty (compare to the bustling traffic during the day). It really made me wonder where did all those people come from and where did all of them go. The crowds and their behaviour really accentuate the inherently contradictory culture of the Chinese people. This is a culture where prices are marked up on merchandise in anticipation of bargaining; a culture where people would fight for the honor of paying another person's dinner, but will refuse to queue up in an orderly manner; a culture communist in ideals but capitalist in practice.

Pin and Klainerman got into a discussion of philosophy. There is a Chinese saying that goes: "Using half of the Analects [of Confucious] is enough to successfully govern the country." What people often don't realise is that if the other half is used, the Country would be ungovernable. The dilemmas manifesting from moral conflicts can carefully be avoided by simply using only half of the Confucian morals as the guideline for society. But at the same time those "moral beliefs" tend to promote a strict top-down control by the government of the people, while leading to a relatively chaotic interpersonal interaction among the "proletarian". For all of the CPC's (or rather, Mao's) efforts in banishing "old supersitition and beliefs" from the people, the power let be is, consciously or unconsciously, implementing precisely those philosophies they are supposed to fight against.

... enough ranting about that. I reckon my thoughts aren't as organized about Chinese philosophy as they are about spinors.

Some random factoids about life here in Beijing. The building we live in now has a clap-on hall way light with a five minute timer: the sound of the opening doors is supposed to trigger the light and allow us enough time to get either from the bottom to our floor, or vice versa.

Dining in Peking University uses a meal card. The students get a permanent one, while visitors get temporary ones. The student cards works just like a debit card (or TigerCard if you will): you put money on it, and they deduct your meals from it every time you purchase something. (The cafeterias are more like food courts of the US malls: there is a huge dining area with lots of tables, and stalls that sell food all around the dining area. Some of them are like the Chinese food stalls at airport food courts: you walk up to them, point at one of several premade dishes, they scoop some out of the bin for you, you ask for some rice, they charge you. Some of them (the noodles stalls in particular), they have all the ingredients more or less prepared, and you just walk up, order something, and they fix it up for you quickly. Each stall is smallish and manned by two to four people. After ordering, they punch a number in to the card machine, you insert your card, and the number gets subtracted from your available funds.)

The visitor one, however, is a rip-off. First, they only sell it in 10 RMB or 50 RMB values. Second, they charge a 15% processing fee up front, so my 50 RMB card is only good for just under 44 RMB of buying power. Third, you can not recharge the visitor card, which is not so bad in itself but for Fourth, you can not charge the same purchase on multiple cards (as far as I know). So that means when the card runs to having less then 10 RMB on it, I need to start paying attention to what I eat, so I don't waste too much of the "round off error" on the card. (Though since white rice is at 0.50 RMB per bowl, I guess it is not quite possible to have more than that much "unusable" funds on the card.)