1. 9/7/16
a. Going on a guided tour
with Xin today to mountains, cool limestone formations and caverns.
b. Noodles for breakfast!
Spicy but delicious.
c. Waiting at tour stop.
d. Bus ride, interesting
countryside with lots of little fields, stone buildings, plenty of untamed
jungle. Work on linear algebra! Derive the fact that two perpendicular vectors
have zero dot product independent of geometric orientation, thence the
geometric invariance of the dot product. Later I work on interpreting the Singular
Value Decomposition, end up proving it and from there, as a shocking easy
consequence, the Spectral Theorem.
e. Steep climb up winding
mountain roads.
f. First up, lunch!
Delicious dim-sum-y meal in style of previous night.
g. Second, a glass window
stretched out from a cliffside, so that you’re suspended on glass maybe 1500
feet off the ground. Helped a little guy feel safe on the glass (cute little
kid was walking on the glass right over the metal-reinforced seams, so I looked
at him and stepped on the center of a pane, where he followed), then nearly
chipped the glass with my water bottle leaning down for Xin to take a photo.
h. Waiting in line for
hike, make friends with some middle-aged ladies. One of them gets a selfie with
me.
i. Three bridges/caverns.
Amazingly beautiful. Xin befriends a young lady and we walk the trails
together. Lots of men standing around waiting to bear customers on bamboo
thrones; doubly sad/low-status in that they are not only bearing their customers
on their backs, but waiting on the caprice and whim of their potential buyers
and cannot even reach 25% resource utilization.
j. Lots of goofy selfies,
one where the sky on the other side of a cavern traces the outline of a great
knife, and I am holding the knife boldly. Xin is a great photographer and he
takes a spudton of photos.
k. Walk features: an old
reconstructed temple, a dinosaur statue (one of the Jurassic Parks was filmed
there). And professional photographers, trying to get your pic and sell it to you.
l. Xin and I choose to Leroy
up hill vs. taking a trolley.
m. Bus to mountain (alpine
valleys, that kind of thing. Finally hit pine trees!)
n. Take train around
mountain. Stop in very pretty valley. Air is fresh and crisp.
o. As we pull back into
town for dinner, Xin tells me that the tour guide says dinner is going to be
bad. In fact, the prikicng model for the tour might best be classified as
“ripoff”. The tour was cheap but as soon as we were un the bus the guide
discusses all the extra fees, exorbitant prices for meals and such. A show,
part of the featured attraction, was an extra 200 yuan ($30). Xin and I didn’t
attend.
p. The dinner actually was
very bad. Whaddaya know—I thought the guide was just being polite! But eating
companions were friendly.
q. We opted to stay in the
cheaper hotel a few km into the countryside, good call IMHO. Guy shows us into
the hotel, cigarette glowing—people smoke a lot in China. Did I mention Xin’s
dad smokes almost constantly? It’s weird, hard to get used to. Anyway, the
light is off in both the “lobby” (random downstairs room with random stuff in
it) and the stairs and hallways. We get into our room and it’s actually quite
nice. (Though, to save money, the toilet paper rolls do not have holes in
them.)
r. Walk, hang out in
supermarket for several hours (price comparison, dorm planning, towels,
awesome). Xin invites me to grill some items at a BBQ cart, really tasty.
s. Walk back, adventure
getting back into locked hotel (Ripoff #2, the cigarette dude said he’d leave
the door open but neither the door, nor his shmidbaggedy self, were open for
business when we returned) After failing to call the tour guide, whose number
was on Xin’s phone back in the hotel, we go around back and knock on the door
of a family living in the same building. Kindly lady lets us into the hotel.
Xin’s good at solving these problems—he’s quick to think and explore and not
afraid to knock on doors.
t. Finish BBQ, write log,
post log, hit the hay.
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