Today was quite a day – we got up early and went to Tianamen Square and then walked through the Forbidden City. It is pretty cool to be at the place which most of us in the rest of the world feel helped signficnatly define modern China.
I took lots of pictures at the Forbiddeen City – It reminded me of the movie Mulan – although that is the wrong Dynasty. I particlularly liked the Imperial Gardens on the north end of the Forbidden City.
At the Forbidden City we ran into a place that made these Chinese Zodiac stamps (year of the dog, etc). I got a particularly cool stamp made for Sakai – actually “think open” Sikai and had the stamp made as the year of the Monkey (2004 when Sakai was born). They hand carved the stamp into soft stone as you waited. My policy is to only behave like a silly tourist the first time I go to a new country :)
We went to a cool noodle shop on the side of the road for lunch and met some local folks who though it was pretty funny that I only knew one word of Chinese “Xia Xia” which is Thanks Thanks and yet was deep in this local neighborhood at a hole-in-the-wall restaraunt.
The we went to Tsingua University and met Prof Chen Jiangang and his team to talk about their techology solutions for higher education. They have an impressive array of software – their seven software modules range from a course management system to a student enrollment system, alumni system and others. They provide an end-to-end solution to higher education in China. They are not open source – they charge for their software – but their customers like it just fine because the team provides such great service and provides a China-only solution highly tuned to the local culture and training environment. Their CMS was similar in function in Sakai – my hope is that in time we can find ways to get Sakai capabilities into their system rather than replacing their system with Sakai. Of course we talked about IMS Tool Interoperability :)
After a great meeting we went to a really nice restaraunt and had Peking duck. I learned a lot about green tea – the fancy stuff you cannot get in the US. You just put the leaves in a tall class with hot water and when the leaves sink to the bottom – you drink – when you get to the point where there is 1.5 inches of water left they put in more hot water so your tea continues.
Everyone is so friendly here. Every time we get ina cab Zhen starts talking for the whole trip – from these cab rides we learn many things – for example today we learned that it is pretty cheap and effective to hire a cab to go all the way to the Great Wall and back in five hours – so we will try to do this Thursday morning. The cost is 500 RMB which is about $45.00 – actually quite a bargain when you think of the convienence and time savings.
Blog photos will be far and few because they cost 0.25 per photo to send – so I will take a bunch and upload them to the blog at trip-end – I will only upload 2-3 per day while here in China. I am uploading some of the photos to the whereissakai tag on Flickr. The Cingular service seems to work fine – data service seems more reasonable than anything else at 0.02 / K.