This will be my last post for more than a week. I’m traveling up north to watch the eclipse and do some traveling around China, a bit more on that later.
The week has been mostly uneventful. On Thursday and Friday, I worked with Ameng in the clean room manufacturing my chip design. Although I’m technically not allowed to touch anything, she allowed me to be an assistant, so I washed and dried chips, and did a great deal of work transferring the glass masks from one heater to another while we baked the photoresist on. We got 2 of the 3 copies of the mask correct, and should finish with the manufacture (i.e. PDMS deposition) when I return from my journies.
On another note, apparently I’m not supposed to be downloading files here either, or at least uploading them. Since I can’t figure out how to turn off that last feature, though, there’s not much I can do, so I won’t be able to get Spanish language tapes. Found this out on Thursday…
On Saturday evening, the group went to see Harry Potter 6 downtown. We ate dinner at a nice Chinese restaurant and had a full course meal, which was wonderful. It was kinda expensive for a Chinese meal, $108 apiece. But since those are Hong Kong Dollars, it turned out to be only about $14 USD, which was amazingly cheap for the quality of food we ate. The movie was also very good, by far the best of the films. Yes, there were bits the director left out, but most of them were unimportant. I quite liked how they treated relationship issues; I think the film dealt with them as well or better than JKR did. There are a few things I’m curious about for the sequel. How they’ll deal with Harry’s mission to find the Horcruxes is a mystery; he didn’t receive the full briefing in the film by Dumbeldore and the department of backstory. But oh well, we'll see how it works out.
Saturday evening was also exciting for the arrival of a typhoon to Hong Kong. Although they are pretty weak by Florida standards, it was still a lot of wind and water. Fortunately, I got a ride home by HKUST security, otherwise I'd have been really really wet by the end of the walk. At home, I watched some episodes of The West Wing, which has all the political intrigue of Battlestar (minus the stuff blowing up every episode), but has the added benifit of being political. Unfortunately, it's a bit addicting. But it was interesting watching an episode about a hurricaine when the wind was raging outside my window.
Yesterday, I spent the afternoon doing laundry and packing and planning. Thanks to a great deal of help from Xiao Xiao, I have my itinerary. Today (Monday) I travel into the mainland and fly to Shanghai from Shenzhen, where I meet a friend of his. On Tuesday, I go to Hangzhou and find a hotel and explore; and then on Wednesday morning, I wake up early to watch the eclipse. Then in the afternoon, I head to the canal city Xitang (featured in the final scene of Mission Impossible III, although they claimed it was Shanghai…). The next day I go to Qiandao Hu (literally, the 1000 Lakes) and stay for at least one night and see (hopefully) a place called the Stone Forest. On Friday the 24th, I return to Hangzhou for two days, where I stay at a youth hostel, and perhaps make some new friends like I did in Kyoto, as well as travel the city. Finally, I go to Suzhou on the 26th and 27th and explore there, before heading back to Shanghai on the 28th and flying back to Shenzhen and ultimately, Hong Kong.
One final thing, for all one of you readers, I’m writing this “blog” as much as a journal for myself as for others, and in my journals, when I think to write them, I record everything. So please forgive the vast wealth of detail and inanity. I’ve learned from experience, if I don’t have some sort of excuse to write, I’ll forget/blow it off.
See you all on the 28th or later!
http://www.orientstocks.com/images/zhejiang2.jpg The map linked contains most of the locations in my travel. Shanghai is in the upper right, Hangzhou ("hahng joe") is in the middle, Suzhou ("Sue Joe") is at the top in the middle, Qiandao Hu ("chee en dao who") is the lake to the southwest of Hangzhou. Xitang ("she tahng") is near Jiashen, which is just southwest of Shanghai
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