Greg and Kat's blog

We spent most of the day walking around the old walled city in Chiang Mai. I feel the same way about wats here that I feel about temples and churches everywhere: I never know the etiquette; it’s always awkward to be walking around like an idiot taking pictures, when there are people trying to have an honest religious experience; if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

This afternoon, we got traditional Thai massages. If you happen to be in Chiang Mai, The Peak was excellent. (800 baht ≈ CDN$27 for 90 minutes) But, here’s a quiz…

Imagine lying on your back. (I could try to draw this, but it’s more fun imagining you all trying to picture what I’m talking about.) Bend your left leg so your knee is pointing up. Move your left foot over your right leg so you’re making kind of a “4”. Now twist your body so your left knee is pushed toward the floor.

Now, have a small Thai woman put her right hand on your left shoulder and push down, and her body weight on your leg, pushing it down. How does this process end? (1) Your hip joint pops out, (2) your back snaps, (3) your left knee hits the floor to the right of your body, (4) you fart.

Trick question. The correct answer is that you make a sound in between a giggle and a gasp. The masseuse whispers “okay” in a kindly way and stops. But of the options above, I think the order would have been (4), (3), (1).

That aside, it was awesome.

We’re in Hong Kong, briefly. The plan for this visit was to ease in to Asia, get over some jetlag, and drop off a bag.

Since I need long-term stuff (more clothes, work stuff, etc), I had a lot of luggage to bring over. But, I don’t want to carry all of that through a half dozen airports over the next month.

Because she’s a genius, Eunice suggested the Hong Kong stop and suggested that we leave a bag at her cousin’s place. The cousin agreed, and we dropped the bag off today. We’re coming back through Hong Kong at the end of the trip to collect it and go our separate ways.

Today we dropped off the bag and wandered Hong Kong island a bit. Nothing spectacular to report. I’ll try to get some pictures up in our gallery tonight.

We’re off to Chiang Mai tomorrow morning. Most of the day is in transit, since we have to fly through Bangkok.

As seems to be the pattern, this blog consists of long breaks, followed by being used as a travel blog. We enter one more iteration of that: before I start teaching in Hangzhou, Kat and I are going to do some travelling.

The ZJU semester doesn’t start until after the Chinese New Year which is quite late this year: classes start February 28. That leaves January and February open for me. Kat’s boss is in the field, so it’s a good time for her to take a vacation.

We get about a month unaccounted for, where the University is paying to get me to Asia. So, we are taking this opportunity to see some of southeast Asia. We leave on Saturday the 19th. The itinerary is:

• Thailand: Chiang Mai and Bangkok.
• Singapore.
• Malaysia: Kota Kinabalu.
• Philippines: Manila and some resort or something.

At either end, we’re staying in Hong Kong for a couple of days. This is partially a decompression, and partially a chance for me to leave some luggage with somebody there, so we don’t have to carry longer-term stuff around a half dozen airports.

We’re going to try to be good about posting here and getting some pictures in the gallery as we go.

Edit: We have opted out of “some resort” in the Philippines, instead lengthening the Manila and Hong Kong stays on either end.

I have now finished six credits (two regular courses) worth of Mandarin. I’m pretty pleased with how things went.

The word “fluent” certainly doesn’t come to mind as a description of my mandarin. Definitely “not totally ignorant” would be fair. I don’t see any way I was going to learn any more of the language in four months, so I’ll take that as a win.

Pleco was a big part of me learning as much as I did. If you’re learning Chinese, you need it. I know it seems like a lot to pay for an app, but screw that, it’s worth it.

At the end of the course, I have 336 flashcards (≈ vocabulary words) in Pleco, with 361 unique characters. I’d guess I can write most of those: maybe 275–300. Basically, that’s enough to occasionally see a Chinese student’s facebook status and figure out more-or-less what’s happening.

My spoken is somewhere between difficult and impossible for a native speaker to understand. It’s better if I’m concentrating on what I’m doing.

Let’s not talk about my listening comprehension. The best way I can describe it: I have enough brain cells to either hear the sounds or process what the sounds mean. I never seem to be able to do both at anything like a reasonable speaking pace.

My top three most annoying things about Chinese:

1. It’s not written phonetically. I thought this would be my biggest problem going into the course. It definitely makes learning vocabulary harder since there are kind of two things to learn for each new word. But somehow it wasn’t a huge irritant as the semester went on.

   I know there are little phonetic hints here and there: I know 吧、把 and 爸 and they sound similar, so I could take a pretty good guess at å·´. Still, there isn’t much of that for a beginner, so I’m not counting it. Also, if I guessed how to pronounce 色 the same way, I’d be very wrong.

2. No capital letters. I have a surname that happens to also be an English word and that has never been a problem. I have never known anyone to read “Baker” and think about a pastry chef, because that’s written “baker”.

   On the other hand, if I come across the sentence “我觉得笑茵很好”, I have to stop and think “I know everything but 笑茵… what is that? Is it a word I should know? Is it a verb/noun/adverb here? Can I guess what it means from the context? The characters contain the bamboo and grass radicals: maybe it’s something about plants?” Basically, I’m screwed out of understanding that sentence.

   If there was some hint that 笑茵 is a girl’s name, then I’d be totally fine: the speaker thinks some girl with that name is pretty. There is no such hint.

3. No spaces between words. Goddamnit anyway, this is no way to run a language.

   Here’s an example to illustrate: “å­¦” (to study) and “生” (to be born/give birth). Thus with no other information, I’d see “学生” and think “studying birth… they must be talking about obstetrics.”

   But no, “学生” is one word: student. How do I know that? Because I know it: nothing about the way it’s written gives me any hint if it’s one word or two. How do you say “to study birth?” Damned if I know. Maybe “学习生” would do the job, but likely some other term. I’m sure there are other examples where the ambiguity is worse and/or harder to clean up.

   That’s probably the computer scientist in my worrying about an ambiguous grammar in that sense. It’s probably my biggest “you guys need to fix your language” thing, though.

Surprisingly not making the list: the tones. Sure, we don’t have anything like them in English, but we don’t have that consonant sound from 词 (cí) either and nobody bitches about that. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I can reliably hear the tones, but that always seemed pretty far down the list of problems.

I have a solid list of things I like about the language too, but that’s going to have to wait for another post.

For reasons that are better left to another blog post, I am not teaching this semester. I have some project students, and am supervising a distance ed course.

Rather than have free time (like a normal person would opt for), I decided to prepare for my semester in exile by taking a Mandarin course.

Being on the other side of the lectern is weird.

And not just any Mandarin course, naturally. I’m taking the intensive course that our DDP students take. It’s basically the regular SFU Mandarin course at double-pace. This means that I’m going to learn a decent amount before I go, but it’s a little like drinking from a firehose.

The instructor has done a really good job of organizing the course to make it all bearable, but there is just a mountain of vocabulary to deal with.

Surprise #1: the written language doesn’t bother me so much—I’m actually pretty good at remembering characters, which I did not expect.

Surprise #2: I’m being a much more kinesthetic learner than I would have ever expected in my learning. The characters are less a picture than a series of motions to draw them. I often remember the tones of words with a motion in my head.

Surprise #3: I recently got a Chinese name (吴君睿/Wu Junrui) and a Renren account (the Chinese facebook equivalent). Using social media with only Google translate and conventions to guide you is a challenge. Doing the CAPTCHA to open the account took me like 20 minutes.

Current mood: cautious optimism.

As I was just mentioning some kind of professional journey, I guess this blog post is overdue…

My department has a joint Dual Degree Program with Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. To be honest, I really had my doubts about the program when it was created, but the more I see, the more I like it. There have been some difficulties, but certainly an overall win for SFU and the CS department.

We have visited ZU twice. When we got back the last time, I decided to put my name on the list for the faculty exchange that is part of the program: every year one person from each school goes to the other for a semester.

I had imagined that there was a multi-year waiting list, and thus imagined that the offer was somewhat abstract. The program director responded with “how about next year?”

So, I’m going to China for the ZU summer 2013 semester: end of February to start of July.

I’ll be teaching two courses when I’m there: a discrete math course for DDP students (those originating from both the Canadian and Chinese sides), and a web development course much like CMPT 470.

The discrete math course should be easy enough. I have taught MACM 101 here, and the course is basically that with a little extra. The Canadian students are just going to be thankful that I’m speaking English. The Chinese students are going to be worried about the English, not the math.

The CMPT 470-like course should be… interesting. First of all, the DDP students are already at SFU by fourth year, so the students in the course will just be rank-and-file ZU students. They won’t be the special cohort with extra motivation to learn English, and an international outlook. Just senior CS students who are willing to give a shot to a course that some foreign instructor is teaching in English.

Problems I see arising: (1) the whole development world at ZU seems to be focused around the big-vendor tools: Java, C#, C++, Visual Studio, etc. I’m going to arrive and insist on Ruby or Python (or similar), since that’s the way things are done in my world. (2) These students have spent their whole lives behind the firewall, and we’ll likely have pretty different ideas of what good web sites are.

Basically, I’m alternating between “wow, what a wonderful opportunity” and “what the hell have I gotten myself into?”

We were watching some No Reservations the other night, and Tony referred to himself as “essentially a journeyman chef”.

For some reason, the word “journeyman” stuck in my brain as one of those words that I don’t really know what it means but probably should. As usual, Wikipedia has an excellent description:

someone who has completed an apprenticeship and is fully educated in a trade or craft, but not yet a master. To become a master, a journeyman has to submit a master work….

And from Merriam-Webster:

an experienced reliable worker, athlete, or performer especially as distinguished from one who is brilliant or colorful

Now the idea was really stuck in my head, because it so perfectly fits a problem I have been having. Occasionally a student says something like “thanks, that course was great”. I have an uneasiness about the word “great” for a reason I can now articulate.

I see myself as a journeyman lecturer.

My courses are those of someone who is fully educated in his craft: they are fairly well designed and executed. But, they fundamentally present the obvious material in the obvious way and aren’t exactly mind altering. Basically, experienced and reliable, not “brilliant or colourful”. None of them are anything I would consider calling a “master work”.

This is exciting, because it means there may be a master work out there somewhere in my future, and I don’t know what it is yet. Note to self: find master work.

So I continued to read the Wikipedia article:

spending time as a wandering journeyman (Wandergeselle), moving from one town to another to gain experience of different workshops, was an important part of the training of an aspirant master

Traditionally, a journeyman well… journeys. A journeyman tradesman would put on the traditional costume and go out, hoping to make enough money working for a master to make his way to the next town. [Important point: the guys in that picture are not historical reenactors. There are still tradesmen in Germany who do this.]

Perhaps there is some professional journey I could take. Let’s come back to that.

[Forgive the gender-loaded vocabulary, but “journeyperson” just isn’t a word and wouldn’t have the same ring to it if it was.]

After almost a year’s absence, I have decided it’s time to bring the blogging back.

It seems that life may be getting more interesting, so there may be more to say.

The tail end of our trip was a day and a half in Hong Kong. We kind of tacked it on the end to get out of mainland China for the National day holiday crowds. As a result, I had no real plan or expectations.

Therefore, Hong Kong exceeded expectations. 😛

In some ways, Hong Kong is smaller than I expected: 7M people (just more than 1/3 of Beijing) and we walked a good chunk of the length of the core (Central to Causeway Bay subway stations) in an hour or so.

I also knew Hong Kong was a tall city: our hotel was hardly in the centre of the city, but from our 15th floor hotel room, I couldn’t see more than a block in any direction, and 8 story buildings below just seemed like a waste of space. It took my brain a while to really process that the whole city is like that.

I have also never been to a more “international” city than Hong Kong, possibly because none exist. I was entirely comfortable in the city: it felt a lot like a taller version of Richmond. I imagine that Brits would be totally comfortable in the city, so should mainland Chinese. Tourists from France seemed pretty at-ease, and there seemed to be a solid Indian population as well. I can’t think of anywhere else I’ve been where so many people could hang around without being out of place.

Also, at 7M people, that must mean that something like 5% of Hong Kongers must now be in Vancouver. (350k Hong Kong immigrants and descendants in Vancouver doesn’t sound that far off to me.) I had never really thought about the numbers from that side: everybody in Vancouver knows a bunch of people from Hong Kong, but everybody in Hong Kong must have a friend or two in Vancouver as well.

In summary: insufficient time spent in Hong Kong; must investigate further in the future.

The blog posts kind of fizzled there as we got tired. We are now back in Burnaby. More pictures have been posted.

Our second day in Hangzhou was dominated by the University: it was my work day. We had lunch at ZJU with some DDP students who will be coming to SFU in 2012 or 2013 (and a few who cam from SFU last year).

The purpose of the lunch was to give students a chance to ask us some questions about SFU and living in Vancouver: all four of us were SFU students at one point. It took a while to talk the people there into organizing an “informal” lunch where we could just chat with the students.

In the end, it worked out exactly like I hoped. Some questions we got: will I have to speak french? How often is Glee on every week? Is there any racism? Can I take business courses too? As usual, the ZJU students were a lot of fun and I’m glad we stopped there.

As expected, after that we became the University’s guests for the rest of the day. We walked through the adjoining botanical gardens and to dinner, which was very Hangzhou-focused and great.

The next day, we walked around the Xixi wetlands with Amy Gu, her husband Kevin and son Roland. Amy and I talked about our courses while the rest looked at birds, and it was great.

Just like last time, I really liked Hangzhou. The idea of going to teach for a semester at ZJU is looking better and better.