From Alyssa

Alyssa Parker

Blog Post #3

6/1/2011

        So, my internship: I started my internship on Monday- the building is a really nice and modern office building in the middle of the business district of Beijing. The office itself is very nice- it has modern Western style furniture and it is on the 43^rd floor so the view is spectacular! My boss is a well-known former professor of environmental sciences at Georgia Tech, and then he was the dean of the Environment college at Beida. He gave me a few goals for the internship: I will be writing a research article on the US-China Low Carbon City project, and helping to coordinate a conference in Palo Alto, CA that will happen in October. I also have been using my Chinese a lot, as everyone there speaks Chinese and limited English. They told me they want me to speak Chinese to them all the time, and they will speak English to me. That way everyone can practice. Overall I am really happy with the internship so far.

                I have Wednesdays off, so today Ashley and I went to the Temple of Heaven in southeast Beijing. It was really cool, and I guess it’s where the emperors during the Ming and Qing dynasties went to worship Heaven and pray for good crops. Then we went to this really swanky shopping district in the middle of the city, where we discovered this random 3-D art exhibit. After that, we headed back to Beida and had dinner with Dean Goodman and Professor Zhao again in the restaurant near our dorm. It was a bit surreal having a small and intimate dinner with two high ranking professors- especially when they came to check out our living situation after the dinner. My stomach hasn’t been reacting all that well to the traditional Chinese cuisine so far (I think because it’s just so greasy, and let’s just say our nice, Western toilet has been getting a lot of action from me lately), but I did have an awesome dish of hand-made noodles the other day that I wish I knew the name of so I could order it more often. Also, I love the cold plum juice some restaurants have for the summer- they call it suanmeitang. Very refreshing. Oh also, on a side note- we had pizza at this Korean pizza place the other night. On the pizza: mushrooms, pork, bacon, potato slices, mayonnaise, cheese and tortilla chips. Yep- welcome to China.

                I’ve seen a lot of weird things lately by American standards, but one that is more than weird in my opinion is the fact that little kids here pee and poop everywhere. Not in toilets. All the time I see little kids squatting down and just going at it on the street. In the subway station, I saw a parent holding her toddler over one of the garbage cans and the kid was just peeing into it. Toddlers even have special pants that are open in the crotch area so that they don’t have to take off their pants. Ashley made the excellent point, however, that if every little kid in China needed to wear diapers, they would run out of landfill space in about a month. So, I suppose China is saving the environment by boycotting diapers and just peeing wherever. Interesting.

Alyssa's room

Ashley's room

On the pizza: mushrooms, pork, bacon, potato slices, mayonnaise, cheese and tortilla chips.

Alyssa at Temple of Heaven