I arrived back in Syracuse at 9:45 on Friday night, after a twelve-hour flight from Beijing and a hop from Chicago. As you might expect, my weekend has been pretty busy with such exciting post-trip necessities as laundry, mail, shopping and intermittent sleep at times that are only slowly becoming normal. The last two weeks have been a remarkably busy, fascinating and exhausting experience. As promised, I intend to write in some detail about them here, but I don't really want to do it in one huge post, so it may take a few. The Summer Institute, at Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, continued in much the same fashion as the first day, on which I already reported. I thought all my co-lecturers did great jobs, and the students were really quite impressive. (Can you spot which of the figures in the photo below isn't a lecturer?)
My talks at the Institute were on Thursday and Friday, titled The Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe, and Connecting Cosmology and Colliders, respectively. Those of us who work in universities in the U.S. often encounter graduate students from China. Usually, these students are clearly talented and score very impressively on written tests. However, it is often the case that, early in their graduate careers, Chinese graduate students are quiet in class, and do not speak up in discussions, or ask questions about crucial points. Obviously, this is not true of all Chinese graduate students, but it is a trend that I, and many of my colleagues, have noticed. I went to Hangzhou fully expecting that, if anything, this trend would be even more pronounced there. However, it was a delightful surprise that this did not turn out to be the case. The students at the Summer Institute were extremely lively and asked multiple questions, many of them quite sophisticated, of each of the lecturers. I expect that the pressures of moving to an unfamiliar country, far away from family, play a role in the attitudes of some of the students we see in our universities. But perhaps the behavior of the students I saw in Hangzhou represents something of the changes that China is going through. Whatever the reason, the students were a major reason that I enjoyed my time at Zhejiang University so much. And it wasn't just the students. On further exploration, Hangzhou really is a beautiful place. Even with temperatures in the high nineties (as they were for us), it was lush and green, with tree-lined roads, extensive walking and cycling paths, elegant, manicured parks and, as I mentioned before, the lovely West Lake.
The Institute ended on the morning of Thursday, August 18th. That afternoon, we boarded a small bus for a three-hour trip to Qiandaohu (Thousand Islands Lake), a famous tourist spot in the Zhejiang region. The lake is a huge reservoir, created in 1959 when a valley was deliberately flooded as part of an early hydroelectric project. At the bottom of this lake are two intact villages that were flooded when the reservoir was created. One can even dive down to see them, although we didn't. The islands are the places where the hills that were previously in this place still stick up above the lake, and in recent years, there have been attempts to exploit them for tourism. We arrived in the area on Thursday evening and checked into our hotel. Unfortunately, the hotel was pretty bad (an error of the tour company, not our hosts). We had dinner, went for a long walk, and then I got a fitful night's sleep. The next morning, after a quick breakfast, we then set off on a boat tour of the lake, which turned out to be both interesting and amusing. We visited four islands in all. The first was called "Snake Island", and consisted of many different enclosures and displays, containing a wide variety of snakes. Quite odd really. The weirdness didn't end there though, because the second island was called "Ostrich Island", with both Asian and Australian ostriches to see. Again, pretty odd. I was completely at a loss to understand why one would choose to populate a couple of islands with snakes and ostriches until Henry Tye explained to me that they were meant to represent the dragon and the phoenix, respectively. The third island was the real find. It wasn't really the island that was impressive, rather it was the view. We took a chair-lift up to the top of the island, from which one got a breathtaking view of a large part of the lake and many of the other islands that dot its surface. In the photo below, taken atop this island, you can see Bing-Lin Young, me, Henry Tye, Ira Wasserman and Joe Silk, all wearing the same ridiculous hat that we bought on the shore just before the trip.
After lunch on our boat, we visited a fourth island, exhibiting a collection of interesting stone formations, then traveled back to Hangzhou and checked into a hotel for the evening, to rest before our flight to Beijing the next afternoon. I'll write more about my second week in China in a future post. I have a lot to tell you about Beijing, both about the science I was involved in there and about the city and its surroundings.
