China, day 3,4 : The meeting

[ellarien]

Among the offerings at the breakfast buffet this morning was a warmer full of french fries, with a nearby sauce boat of ketchup. I started with fruit and cereal, but it felt distinctly odd eating cornflakes with a porcelain Chinese spoon.

The conference is being held in two buildings of the Beijing Institute of Technology. The meeting rooms are obviously classrooms, and I suspect that they aren't normally air-conditioned, as the strain of running the portable air conditioning units caused the breakers to trip twice today -- putting rather a crimp in a couple of the talks, as the room was a bit too large to comfortably follow the powerpoint slides on the speaker's laptop screen. I was feeling sorry for the students being expected to endure that sticky heat without artificial cooling, until it occurred to me that it probably isn't quite this hot and humid in term time.

The gardens in front of the institute are rather pleasant, with lush lawns, ornamental hedges, and a display of blooming potted lotus outside the main gate. Admonitory Chinese signs translated into English tend to come out sounding rather poetic; in the case of signs reading 'Please show the feeling of love to the green land,' and 'The many shades of green add color to our lives' and apparently designed to convey the message 'Please keep off the grass,' I'm inclined to think this is intentional. 'Be seated along the way,' on the backs of bus seats, is probably more prosaic in the original, though.








This evening was taken up by a rather grandiose open ceremony -- lots of speeches in English and Chinese, with simultaneous translation for the Chinese ones, pretty young hostesses in identical purple velvet gowns, and a band of lovely young ladies in scarlet playing traditional instruments -- followed by a reception that was billed as a banquet but from which I didn't manage to glean more than half a plateful of nibbles and a glass of wine. In theory it's probably not too late to go and find a real dinner, but I don't think I'll bother. The bus rides there and back provided more views of the contrasts of Beijing -- I saw one particularly flimsy-looking apartment block, like ten or so single-wides piled one atop another, laundry festooning the windows, right in front of a spanking new glass office building.


The wireless internet in the meeting building was probably overloaded, as I had a hard time getting or keeping a connection. The earlier posting was made while I was sitting on the front steps at lunchtime. I finally figured out that the hotel room does actually have broadband at a reasonable hourly rate, so I'm going to try that.



Tuesday was damp and drizzly. There were no sessions in the afternoon, so I came back to the hotel, walking the half-mile or so rather than taking the bus, rented the internet for twenty-four hours, and settled down to work on my paper for the next meeting. I took a tea break later in the afternoon and bought some bits and pieces at the hotel gift shop, including a rather nice blue silk kimono with silver flowers that I think might be my outfit for the banquet at the next meeting. (The dress I bought in 1986 for my first ever conference banquet is still perfectly good, and fits, but it does look a little dated these days.) I'm an XL in Chinese sizing, it turns out. (I'm pretty much a Small in American terms, occasionally needing medium in shirts and jackets for the shoulders and sleeve length.)

It occurred to me, as I ate quietly at the buffet in the evening, that this hotel is a very good environment for helping me cope with the strangeness of China; it's not exactly like a big American hotel, but everyone speaks English, the
plumbing is to Western standards, and the food is ... unthreatening, if not quite as Western as it's apparently trying to be. I don't have to go through the business of attaching myself to a party and eating out at a different restaurant every night, which has always been at least as much stress as pleasure for me on conference trips.