ISU SSP 3: Diversifying My Bonds

Note: I have created a new photo album that can be found here. However, for some reason I cannot view the pictures, therefore I can’t directly link them. I don’t know how they are organized in the album, so I can’t tell you where to scroll if you want to find one on the specific topic. I will link to a few other things related to what I’m writing about. I’ll save the details on American culture night for the next update, but you can view the video I made for the occasion here. Also, if a link doesn't work, please let me know.

Fate has a lack of respect. Within five minutes of my last post, I felt the Rumble in the Jungle as Intellectual’s Revenge forced me to use a non-western toilet before I could race back to my room to the Fortress of Solitude to drop a deuce in peace. Luckily, someone brought along what is probably the 5^th greatest invention of all time: a folding chair with a big hole in the middle to put right over the hole. Excellent.

I would like to take this time to dispel a common racial stereotype right here and now. Black people, you have been stereotyped in the past for eating watermelon. However, you have NOTHING on the Chinese people. At every single meal, we have been served watermelon. At every street food vendor, you will see watermelon. At every cafeteria, you will see at least one girl eating half a watermelon and ONLY that watermelon for lunch. If I don’t like breakfast, I’ll end up eating about 7 slices of watermelon simply because it’s served in mass quantities. The Chinese word for “fruit” has the Chinese word for “water” in it. Chinese people, you win.

Every week, students from four different countries have to present on something about where they came from. Last week (June 30^th), the Chinese, Romanian, and French students went. The Chinese went first and had a half hour because they are the host site for the SSP, and every other country gets 15 minutes. I expected to see something like the opening ceremonies, something completely wild and over the top, but it was just the students presenting, not CASC sponsoring an opera and a “man of a million faces” routine. They passed out some Beijing 2008 Olympics merchandise; gave away some other stuff; talked about history, culture, architecture, and kung fu; and demonstrated tai chi. I was not extremely impressed, but since I came in expecting something like that opening ceremony, it’s my own fault I was let down. They did an excellent job.

Since Virgil is the only Romanian student, he had to present on Romania by himself. Rather than do a Power Point presentation or dance or something foolish, he made a video where he went around asking people what they know about Romania. It was then followed up by an actual Romanian tourist bureau infomercial about Romania. His video was pretty funny, but because of some sound issues, no one heard what was going on, so he had to narrate. He put the video on the shared drive so everyone could here a Chinese girl profess her love for him.

After the presentations, everyone was pretty much liquored up enough to start dancing, so the tables were moved and the whole crowd danced until the bar closed at 10:30. A lot of people left to go out immediately before then, but I left too late to catch up, so I went to bed afterwards.

This is where I learned something very important that contradicted what I knew about the world of dance. As a white male whose one season in marching band screwed up much of my ability to dance without rigid step patterns, I know that I look terrible on the dance floor without a fine looking partner and some dance lessons. However, I learned that night that it is common for the rest of the world (or at least Asia) to think Americans can dance well. No matter what terrible moves I stole from movies or conflicting dance styles, others copied me, and people cheered for me no matter what.

American Stereotype: White guys can’t dance
Asian Stereotype: Americans can dance

Ahh, the things you learn from international travel.

The next day a large group of us went to the Lama Temple. Before we left, I had another chat with Gary Martin (see last post).

Gary: So yeah, I talked to my boss about you, and he said you we alright
Ben: Really?
Gary: Yeah, he looked at your application and said you had been accepted, so you’re fine, no worries.
Ben: Oh, so I am supposed to be here? There was no mistake?
Gary: Yeah, you’re good.

So it’s official, I AM supposed to be here. As the Red Stripe commercials say, “HooRAY Beer!”

We took the subway to the temple, and as we walked around the outer gate, I couldn’t help but notice the dozens of tiny little shops selling nothing but LOADS of incense. I couldn’t understand how they could all stay in business just selling stuff that only pot smokers use in the states. I soon found out how.

The Lama Temple was impressive, but I was disappointed there were no animals that looked like camels without humps. Instead, there were tons of bronze statues, awesome roofs, and a Guinness World Record-holding statue of Buddha carved out of a tree trunk.

The coolest thing I saw all day was one of the three deities. I’m not sure, but I think his name is Yamantaka. He’s a guy with what looks like the head of a dragon or bull, a second and third smaller head on top of his main head, and somewhere on the order of 100 arms. I don’t know how he put all his arms down, but then again if I had that many I’d wave them around and look scary too. Every statue of him showed him choking (or worse) some woman and looking scornful. I tried to find a statue of him to buy, but the only ones they had were expensive bronze. If can I find one cheaper, I will definitely pick it up.

Throughout the courtyards and in every single indoor area, there were altars and knee rests where the devout Buddhists would bow, pray, and either place or burn incense. Outside, there were large fire pits that some just dumped whole packs of incense into. Inside, fires are not allowed, but people laid the incense sticks in front of the statues or tables, I guess as a sacrifice. The incense didn’t even smell that great. I walked through a thick cloud of smoke and all I smelled was smoke and wood burning. Every single person brought piles of incense in and dumped it all on fires or laid it in front of alters.

The temple was absolutely beautiful, and after looking at each statue or piece of metalwork, I started wondering “how much time did the artist spend on this one particular work?” “If the artist didn’t build these statues/make these roofs/do whatever that person did, what else would they have done?” “How much money went into making all of this?” “If these people had concentrated their resources on building a space program, when would they have launched their first rocket? Probably around 1782.”

Ahh, the wandering thoughts of an engineer.

Afterwards I went to the gift shop and bought a blue silk outfit. The original price was Y480, and I bargained it down to Y200. I still may have gotten ripped off, but oh well. It has two golden dragons going down the sides of the abdomen area and traditional Chinese buttons. I think it looks awesome, and I’m going to wear here one day when I know there’s not a lot of physical activity to do.

Once we left the Lama Temple, we went across the block to a Confucian temple. Along the way we were assaulted by beggars, people peddling Olympic merchandise and Mao watches, and calligraphists. The place was cheap to get into (Y3 instead of Y10 because I had my student ID), but because of the Beijing Olympics, most of the place was under renovation. Check out the pictures to see more. The most interesting things were the large statue of Confucius and a weird turtle/dragon thing inside a pavilion.

Another weird cultural difference I saw was the openness of construction sites. Along the sidewalk, workers were renovating or rebuilding a lot of the little shops along the main street, and anyone could easily walk up right into the site and start building if they wanted to. Workers mixed concrete right on the street with a hose and a shovel, which was far different from the method we employed while building the Flamespeed wall at work the three weeks before I came here.

I don’t know how to put this nicely, but here it is; some of the beggars on the streets looked terribly deformed. I’ve seen a few people with burned faces, no arms, no feet, and mouths that couldn’t close all the way. Small children were riding wheeled carts because their feet were mangled and that’s how they could get around. I have not idea what could have caused this on such a scale, but if anyone knows anything about this, please let me know. A lot of recent Chinese history is unknown to me, and because of the fear of government I can’t always get straight answers from the natives. I read up on some of the major events that have transgressed in the past 58 years, but nothing in great detail.

Not to get sidetracked… after we left the Confucian temple, Stacey, one of the TAs who lived in Beijing for a few years a while back and speaks Chinese, took us to a tea place and we had a tea ceremony. I’m not a huge tea drinker (read: I hate tea, and unless it has a pound of sugar in it, it takes like leafy water), so I wasn’t too excited about it. We all sat around a table as one of the waiters went through the ceremony of cleaning the glasses, mixing the tea, pouring the tea for us, showing us how to properly get the tea into a different glass than the one she poured it in, then showed us how we’re supposed to smell the empty glass and put it on our eyes to make our eyes feel better. Yeah, it was a little weird.

It was much more fun to just sit down and talk with the other students about where they come from. However, after many glasses of tea (the glasses were about 2 ounces), I perfected the one-handed technique of getting the tea from the tall, thin glass into the short, stout glass. It’s hard to imagine without pictures, but the technique starts with your dominant hand being held so it looked like the bottom hand of someone doing a kamehameha wave. You pick up the two glasses (the short one on top of the tall one), bring them up quickly and rotate it into an Eagle’s Claw (or at least that’s what I think it looks like, only with the thumb and ring finger on the bottom). Once you’ve flipped them, your hand is able to set them down. Men are supposed to hold the tea glass exactly like the Drunken Boxing hand position. Yes, I watch too much kung fu.

As for the actual purpose of me being in China in the first place… The ISU curriculum is split into three major phases, all lasting about 3 weeks. There are also program sections, the Core Lectures, the Department Activities, and the Team Project. Phase I is all the Core Lectures in the morning with either introductory Department Activities or early Team Project meetings in the afternoon. Phase II comes after the exam (held at the beginning of the 5^th week) and consists mostly of Department Activities with some Team Project meetings. Phase III is entirely devoted to the Team Project.

The Core Lectures show the ISU’s spirited approach to a truly interdisciplinary education. They bring in experts from around the world to give us lectures on engineering, satellite applications, orbital mechanics, space medicine, life science, zero gravity, space policy and law, space business management, astronaut selection criteria, solar system astronomy, and other areas crucial to the space industry. Dr. Jeff Hoffman (mentioned in the last post) is one of the lecturers, and another I’d like to mention is Dr. Nikoli Tolyarenko. He’s the director of the Master’s Program for the ISU, but has worked for the Russian space agency since it the 1960’s. He met Yuri Gagarin and was one of the designers of the Russian space shuttle that never flew. This man knows everything there is to know about propulsion systems and flight engineering. He has a thick Russian accent, but can be very funny at times. It’s hard to describe his sense of humor, but it does break the monotony of his voice and keeps people awake.

There are 7 departments at ISU: Space Business and Management, Space Life Sciences, Space Policy and Law, Space Physical Sciences, Satellite Applications, Space Systems Engineering, and Space and Society. These departments are meant to further knowledge in a field the students are unfamiliar with, i.e. an engineer would not choose the Satellite Applications or Space Systems Engineering departments. Since I also have some background in physics, I wouldn’t choose the Physical Sciences department either.

Almost every afternoon (with some team project meetings thrown in on some afternoons) we have had an introduction to one of the departments. Some of them have been pretty boring, while others have been rather interesting. I’ll have more info in the next update on these workshops since I haven’t had them all yet.

Finally, the Team Projects are meant to be big international collaborations on specific space topics that can produce publishable and presentable results (for instance, each team could send sub groups to conferences around the world to present on their topics). Each team needs to write an Executive Summary and a maximum 100-page report. There are four TPs: the Lunar Biological and Historical Archive, the Use of Space Technologies to Monitor and Respond to Earthquakes, On-Orbit Servicing – Future Capabilities for Space Missions, and Space Traffic Management. Since I really had no preference, I left my choice form blank and got assigned to the Lunar Archive project, one that I somewhat wanted to do because of its impact on the long-term survival of humanity in the event of a swift global cataclysm, but somewhat didn’t want to do because of the argument that you could easily have something like it on Earth. We’ll see how that goes in the future.

Next Update: Panels, US Culture Night, Tienneman Square, and my MDRS lecture.