May 31, Thursday

Xioayan did her thesis defense this morning. It was pouring so I stayed in the room to blog and get ready for the trip tomorrow. Chuck said that she did a “Superior” job. He gave her a UCLA hooded sweatshirt as a little congratulation present.

We all went for lunch at the guest house. (Wood ears mushrooms, shrimp, both boiled and fried, spicy tofu, meatballs with rice on the outside, dumplings, beef tendons, fish, long skinny mushrooms, soft spicy tofu, mushroom soup and sesame balls. Noodle soup was the main food.) This was a lot of food, but there were a lot of people.

In the Chinese system, there are several visitors from other universities who sit in judgment. At UCLA, it is normally just people from the university, but there is always someone from outside the physics department.

After lunch, Chuck and I went to explore some more department stores. (4 flights) The first one was sort of a bust, but the second one was more interesting. Then we stopped at the “Good Wood Coffee shop” (1 flight – we went up the wrong staircase) for a drink. It struck me that Good Wood didn’t make much sense, but if M and W were thought to be interchangeable – then Good Mood made much more sense. I will have to find out how Chinese letters work.

Everyone met again for a gala dinner. (1 flight) Nu Xu is the Chinese guy from Berkeley who is a tremendous foodie. He loves having large groups to order for. He keeps trying to find something that Chuck and I won’t eat. We have said that there are things that we personally wouldn’t order again, but we pretty much will try anything. Tonight’s challenge was deep fried snake. He also wants us to guess what it is we are eating. Snake was easy. Deep fried anything tastes good. It came with shredded carrots mixed with snake skin. We also had snake and turtle soup. This was box turtle – not soft shelled. It was very good. The snake is just mostly bones. This soup cost 400¥. I don’t think that we will bother ordering it ourselves.

Another challenge was duck’s tongues with sugar snap peas. Nu forgot that we had already had them at another dinner with him in Hefei. So he was a little surprised that we guessed right away.

Back to our room to pack for the big adventure.

6 flights