Today is the 10th of September. Yesterday’s party ended just a little too late for most people, so no one minded the fact that the morning tai-chi was canceled. For some people, the tai-chi would have been a welcome event, since the climbing of the Great Wall resulted in a lot of sour legs.
Today will feature the first company visits of this study tour, so at 11 (!) o’clock, everyone arrived in the lobby fully dressed-up. We first headed towards the area where all the embassies are located, in order to pick up Chang and have lunch with someone from the Dutch Consulate. The bus driver had quite some difficulty finding the location, but eventually we took our seat in a local restaurant, together with David Pho, who is in charge of the department for cooperations in science and education, and Anny, a trainee in the same department. David first gave a presentation of the work he’s doing, after which it was time for lunch. The restaurant served food from the Yunan kitchen, which has a great variety of different dishes, all equally tasty. Unfortunately the room we sat in was too small, so the group had to be divided. I was seated with David, Tom and some others, and mainly discussed education in China and the Netherlands. I heard from the other group that Anny gave them some useful tips.
As soon as lunch was over, we had to say goodbye and continue our trip to the Tsinghua university, allegedly the best university of China. Upon arrival we saw two students with a welcome sign for Bram Nauta. After entering the building of the faculty of micro- and nanotechnology, we also noticed that posters had been hung everywhere, so it was a pity that Bram was not present.
The students of Tsinghua first show us some corridors with posters of the faculty’s organization and accomplishments, after which we seated ourselves in a college room, where Wouter gave his first presentation of the study tour. The Chinese students that were present were pleasantly surprised by the fact that the sheets were bilingual. Earlier, David Pho had also mentioned that we were apparently well prepared and had good knowledge of Chinese manners and habits.
Following Wouter’s presentation, five PhD students gave a presentation of the work they did at this university. The presentations respectively discussed the introduction of flexible loudspeakers, inductive power coupling for biomedical applications, software-defined radio, germanium MOSFET’s and lastly the resistance of a metal-graphene connection. I found the talks interesting, although I sometimes had difficulty understanding the Chinese English of the presenters.
After the presentations, there was some room for discussion with the students of Tsinghua, and we were shown the local cleanroom, which was not so that clean. It was then time to return to the hotel to change clothes and go for dinner. We went to the Bell Tower quarter, which features those typical Chinese streets full of small restaurants and food stands, as well as a lot of LED-lighting and lots of activity. Pretty soon it turned out that no restaurant could house all 25 of us, so we split up. The food was great everywhere, albeit for different prices. Furthermore, the term hot on a menu really means that the dish is very spicy, so that was one more lesson learned.
Soon after dinner, we went back to our hotel at around 10pm. Several people went for a drink, but most people decided to go to bed early. Like several others, I went to the hotel bar to make use of their wifi-network and to write this story, after which I finally went to find my bed.
Freddy Gunneweg