Mid Autumn Festival

The first Chinese festival we encountered is a three day festival called Mid Autumn Festival. The Mid Autumn Festival is a traditionally festival for the Chinese farmers to celebrate the end of the summer harvesting.

For the common Chinese it means to get together with your family and loved once to celebrate. Since a lot of people that I met come from all over China it is for some difficult or expensive to go home for just 3 days. So instead of celebrating spring festival with their family it is quite common to celebrate it with friends instead.
NPU provided all international students with a traditional cake called "mooncake" which people traditionally eat with family or friends under the moon during spring festival.


For us these three days just meant relaxing.
To partipate our Chinese friends in their celebration we were invited to join them to eat at a steak house. We ordered our steaks and drinks and had some friendly conversations. Things seemed to be going quite smooth up till the point that the food was served out. One of the chefs that brought the food lost his balance a bit which made a fork full of steak sauce fall off the plate over my pants and Gaby's dress.
The chef walked away without a word. I was quite upset with this and I demanded an excuse, our Chinese friends told me that this sometimes happens and that it is okay. I gave them one good argument that I pay the restaurant to enjoy their food not to get my clothes ruined. After a closer look a Gaby's dress which was badly covered with sauce she seemed to catch the spirit. The waiter was called for and a free melon was offered and an excuses given. This was enough for me however my other Chinese friend Linc (Gaby's colleague) was not satisfied yet and asked the waiter back.
After a few words he told us that we will get a 20% discount on everything we ordered. I was amazed. The same people that at first accepted what happened turned into hardcore negotiators the moment they realized that they were being deputized.
Linc actually thanked me afterwards for teaching him this lesson. It was my pleasure.

Chinese Friends and the Hotpot experience

On the 4th of September we decided to go clubbing with our African friend Edgar and Stefan's roommate Val (short for Valentine).
We met Edgar in the previous week during a walk on campus. He told us that he arrived 3 weeks earlier than us and said he checked out a few nightclubs which he would like to take us to. In the mean time we had invited Val, who apparently went to NPU alone, to join us to dinner and lunch on regular basis. He seems to me like a nice guy which company I can enjoy. On Saturday the 5th of September we met up with Edgar and went to a club called Fantasy located in the main South street of the city center.
The moment we stepped in to Fantasy I had the feeling it was going to be a great night. I'm not sure if it was because of the hot stage girls dancing in their langere or if it was because of the bottle of Jack Daniels that Edgar had ordered. Either way it felt pretty good and it didn't take long before I got in a party mood and wanted to dance. Val joined me and before we knew it different Chinese girls wanted to have a dance with us. I was just enjoying the vibe dancing with different Chinese I thought this was pretty cool and with all respect I had a fun dance with them.

I took a break and had a drink with Stefan. We were talking about the club and the great time we were having so far in China. At that time I noticed a Chinese girl, that stood out by her cartoon-ish shirt, was standing in front of me. She said "hello" and introduced herself as Gaby. We talked a bit and soon after she wanted to have a dance, I agreed. We danced a bit, talked a bit and she seemed really nice. She asked for my Chinese mobile number, which we just so happened to buy a few days earlier. Unfortunate during my stay in the USA my HTC Hero phone decided to give me trouble after the wrong update was installed. This caused my phone to shut down at times when I most needed it, in this case to get a girl number. I asked Frank to catch her number and to give her mine. I told her I would contact her the next day when my phone would work. She took my number from Frank said goodbye and left. The rest of night we danced some more and a second bottle was ordered. By the time we arrived back at campus it was around 05:30. Unfortunate for us there was a big chain around the dorm entrance meaning that we had to wait for another hour before the door would be unlocked. We staid awake and at 06:20 the door opened, we could finally go to our dorm. For some, maybe a bit tipsy, reason I was tired of my phone malfunctioning and decided to fix it right away before heading to sleep. In the end it took me around 3 hours but I finally got it done! I went to bed at 09:30.

I slept for 5 hours before I got up at 13:30 with a slight hangover. However it seemed something had effected my system, because the stomach problems that occurred in Beijing returned. I made the conclusion that it had to be ice cube related. Since I'm quite sure it was not the alcohol previous drinks with beer were no problem, however any mix drink with ice cubes caused me to drop the next day.
With my phone fixed I asked Frank to give me Gaby's number. I send her a message and we started texting (SMS) back and forward, which on that same day turned in to MSN and later, on her recommendation, QQ (A Chinese messenger program). It seemed I made a Chinese friend she shortly after invited all of us to go with her on Wednesday to the Big Wild Pagoda, where the largest fountain of Asia is located. This seemed like a great idea and we accepted her invite.

We had a great time that Wednesday and Gaby introduced us to a few of her friends: Alwyn, Hayle, Tina. Together we watched the Fountain show which lasted about 20 minutes. After the show it was time to go back to campus and we got an invite to join all of them on Friday to eat the traditional 火锅 (Hotpot). Not knowing what Hotpot is we agreed to try it with them.

Friday 10th of September after our first week of Internship we took the bus to the restaurant where we would meet. We learned that day that traveling between 17:30 - 19:00 is near impossible due to the heavy traffic. We arrived a bit late but this didn't seemed to be much of a problem. Once settled down at a big round table, a big bowl of what seemed like some sort of soup, split up in two sections, spicy and not spicy, was presented in front of us. Our new Chinese friends ordered meat, vegetables and beers to celebrate our new friendship. The meat and vegetables was given raw on a plate and it was up to us to boil it in the soup. The concept was very interesting since everyone was eating from the same soup bowl with their chopsticks. At times Gaby would hand us some boiled food to help us out a bit since our skills with chopsticks where not that great.

After dinner we decided to all go to Fantasy here we had a great night. Again the same problem occurred with the dorm, it was locked with a big chain when we arrived. I was really exhausted of dancing with our Chinese friends and decided to lay down on the pavement. I fell a sleep for nearly an hour, by the time I woke up only 10 minutes were remaining before I could go inside an sleep. I had a great night and slept well, this time without any stomach problems. I'm quite sure we will meet our Chinese friends more often in the coming weeks to experience new things here in Xi'an.

Internship Work and Assignment

In the morning on the 6th of September we had a discussion in our office with Professor Yong Yang. The discussion was about our assignment for the coming 5 weeks.
Basically we will be programming full time in a computer language called FORTRAN. FORTRAN is a very old programming language created by IBM in the 1950s. With FORTRAN we will try and solve various aerodynamics problems. These problems are mainly focussed on pressure distributions surrounding 2D airfoils. After the discussion I had to call in sick on my first internship day. :(
I'm not sure what happened but all of a sudden I didn't feel good at all and my temperature started to rise quite a bit 38.5(C). So I went home around lunch time and slept for a total of 20 hours!
The next morning the temperature had dropped and I wanted to catch up on the reading Frank and Stefan had done in the previous day.
Fortunate for me programming has been a hobby of mine in which I'm starting to get more and more familiar. During the summer I have been working as a web-developer in PHP/MySQL for a consulting company. However those are different languages than FORTRAN. Luckily all program languages contain similarities at least in the basics. Within a day of work I felt quite comfortable in the FORTRAN language and tried some of the smaller advanced code examples. This went relatively well.
During Wednesday afternoon I challenged Stefan to try and build the game Tic-Tac-Toe within Fortran. In my experience setting a challenge which people can associate with, in this case a game, allows people to rapidly learn while increasing the fun factor of what might some times seem a bit dull.
Within in a day we both created our own games and during the process I was able to teach Stefan the concept of using Arrays. This turned out to be quite useful, because on the last day we were asked by one of the Chinese students to try and produce a Matrix solver. Which solves matrices for any size.
This assignment was a new experience for me and I gained a new insight in how I could use my programming skills to produce helpful tools. Solving matrices was a subject that was handled during the first year of my Aeronautical Engineering course. Although this is relatively not to hard it would have been nice to sometimes check the answer of matrices that I tried to calculate during that time.
Who knows a possible future in developing education tools? We shall see in time.
Frank mainly focussed on solving geometry problems regarding triangles. So he did not participate with our little challenge. In the coming weeks we will focus on solving the various problems set by the professor starting with the non lifting pressure distribution around a 2D cylinder. Not sure if I'll post about these things since I can imagine that it might not make sense to most people that read this ;)

Hello NPU (The First Week)

After our Beijing adventures we finally arrived at the city of destination, Xi'an.
Xi'an know for being the culture capital of China will be our home for the coming 5 months. Here we will study at 西北工业大学 (Northwestern Polytechnical University / NPU)
During the last weeks I have kept in contact with the head of overseas students departments Mr. Wentao and was able to arrange pick-up from the airport.
The pick up would take us directly to the campus.
For the first time in my life I came out of baggage claim with a person holding up a sign with my name! I thought this was pretty cool.
The person with the sign turned out to be mister Du from the International Office, he would be responsible for us during our stay in Xi'an. If we have any trouble or need to get something done, he would be the guy we would have to go to. He arranged a van which took as from the airport to the old campus located just south west of Xi'an City wall.


The drive to the campus took around 40 minutes.
When we entered the Campus gate we were amazed it pretty much seemed like a small city. It was huge, after a few street turns we arrived at the international dormitory. Here the university had arranged rooms for us to life in during our internship.
By random choice Frank and I were matched up to stay in the same apartment. Stefan would share his apartment with a French male student. Our rooms were dusty so we decided to clean them first before unpacking. We heard from mister Du that a supermarket would be on the other side of the road called RenRenLe this is where we could buy some product to clean our rooms.
In the supermarket each isle had multiple employees trying to assists us in buying all kinds of different items. At one point we were surrounded by 8 employees all holding different wash detergent, while we tried to figure out which was best quality/price value.
After we cleaned our dorms and unpacked our stuff, we went to small restaurant on campus called TimesCafé to have some dinner. Here we learned about the word 没有 ( meiyou), everything we tried to order on the menu was "meiyou","meiyou" and "meiyou".
This was quite a shame since I was really looking forward to try a pizza. The thing they did have was some rice, with soy-sauce. It was quite dry, a bit of a let down.

The rest of the week we spend time visiting the international office to get our student cards, internet for the dormitory and talking to some other international students. On creation of my student card it turned out that someone else already had taken my student number so it took a bit longer than usual to get my card produced. This card is also a paying card for the school cafeterias and room facilities like water, electricity and internet. On Friday morning we met with our Chinese professor Yong Yang. He would be our supervisor for our internship periode. We had a nice talk about our stay in China so far, what to expect for our internship. He took us to our office on the 5th floor of one of the Aeronautic buildings. The room was labeled "Experimental Software Division" when we opened the door it was clear that the room was not used for a long time. Dust everywhere.
The professor explained cleaning the office is our own responsibility, the benefit would be that no one else will touch your work. This made sense and during the weekend we made sure to clean our office.
The setup is quite nice we all have our own desk with office chairs and dual core pcs to work on were provided. Overall an easy first week on NPU nothing much going on except settling down and explore the area a bit.