I have not written in some days. I had all the intentions to write yesterday but all the issue in Venezuela made me quite sad, so I just got detached and distracted. Nevertheless, here we are today.

When I booked the hotel for my first days of stay (almost two months) it looked so far away and now it turns out I am close to the end of my booking period. I am currently waiting to decide where will I be in February. The reason is that here the vacation period of winter lands on February, where the Chinese New year happens. I can stay in Beijing but chances are I will go to a place close to the city but outside where another math center is. It is cheaper place and also later, once I am fully working here, I will not have a complete opportunity to go there and spend long period over there.

I had my first mandarin lecture previous week. My teacher told me that she realized I am better prepared that she had anticipated. That made me happy although I do not exactly now what that means. In anyway we have one hour of lecture every wednesday from now on. I want to improve. At the moment I recognize around 50 characters, my vocabulary is weak and my listening is weak. Although, when I listen to random mandarin spoken I do not feel lost in the sense that it is meaningless, rather I realize I am missing so much vocabulary that I cannot even say I do not understand. I don’t even have the words. Thus I have to start studying more vocabulary! From what I understood the teaching telling me, the part of the whole course she has prepared for me starts with increasing vocabulary. The reason being that I have certain fundations of grammar already.

I have a certain dichotomy. I do not know what I would prefer: reading mandarin or speaking mandarin. The reason is that I enjoy reading quite a bit. One of the things that has been bittersweet here are libraries and bookstores. When I was living in Toronto I had access to a lot of books. Toronto has decent “official” bookstores and really very good second hand bookstores. Probably the most famous one in the city is BMV. There are three (I think…) locations, and the biggest of them has three floors. Through the ten years that I lived there I bought a lot of books from them. I liked their random philosophy where I bought quite a lot of my Slavoj Zizek collection. I enjoyed their art section because, somehow, they had books that had been made for exhibitions in museums. I learned about a lot of artists from those random books. Their sections on literature, psychology, sports, criminal law, etc…were marvelous. On the top floor they had only comics and graphic novels.

In the “decent” bookstore, called Indigo, there were many chairs and tables. I could see many teenagers sitting there just working in the tables. There is a piano that people can play and people would go and practice. Mostly atrociously I must say. The first time I went to that particular store it was when I participated in the Fields Undergradate Summer Program 2014. I spent two months in Toronto. The bookstore impressed me a lot and I even got a points card. That same card continued to work when I was accepted to the PhD in Toronto!

An activity that I really enjoyed doing was going to that bookstore and pick a book that I found interesting. Then I would keep going and I would read the book there. I would never pay for it. I read so many books like that. Previous year only I read there nine books.

• Where Reasons End, Yiyun Li. This author is the mother of two sons, of similar ages. Both of them died by suicide. After each of the suicides she wrote a book. I have always found suicide a very interesting topic to talk about and study, however scary it can be. Even more so, for some unfortunate reason, in moder day academia among students of different degrees suicide and suicide attempts are very common. This is the book written after the first suicide. I decided to read it when the new york times made a review of the book after the book of the second suicide. To find meaningful, whatever that might mean, books on suicide is hard. So I read them.
• Hunchback, Saou Ichikawa. This book is about the life of a woman with a crippling disease. It is very short but it is really very witty. I really enjoyed it. She lives in a take care home, but she has a lot of money, so she really has everything she could want except that she has to live with her very intense disability. However, if I remember correctly, she wants to get pregnant. Thus the story unfolds. I remember reading this book and laughing out loud at several parts and the teenagers in the same desk as I was looking me like a weirdo.
• Zero Point, Slavoj Zizek. After the attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 Zizek was invited to give the opening speech on Frankfurt book fair. In there his speech caused a lot of problematic and uproar. This book is his meditations and reply to this upraor which he considers unmeditated and unfair. It was a very interesting book to read. I used to bike from my home to the bookstore 4 or 5 times a week to read. I would sit down and make gargantuan efforts to do not fall asleep, and sometimes I did fell asleep reading the books…
• The Native Trees of Canada, Leanne Shapton. This is a book on drawing of trees. It is unremarkable but I wanted to see it. It’s a book so it counts for goodreads.
• When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, Jordan Thomas. This is a book about the author’s experience being a hotshot. These are the people that fight forest fires on the front lines. he describes here the story of fire and the way man, in California and that region, has progressed. I loved this book but it deeply impressed me. The conclusion in great part i that fires, due to global warming, are now so different to what we knew that we are in serious trouble. I decided to read this book because I like fire, I also have a cartoon on certain apocalyptic situation that I have been designing for some time and this helped me with some ideas, and finally the reviews were very interesting.
• My Death, Lisa Tuttle. This is horror fiction, but not exactly a horror story in the sense of a haunted house, or a ghost or so. It is a regular novel, with a plot, that suddenly shows you a creepy ending that is quite interesting. I found this book by chance. I used to walk through the bookstore and open random books. When I found one that seemed interesting I read it. Certain goal of mine was to read authors that I did not knew and that I haven’t heard. Just give in to the literature.
• The Swallows of Kabul, Yasmina Khadra. This is a stroy that develops in Afghanistan. It starts with the stoning of a woman and how it unfolds when one of the main characters, which is a regular man, is having a terrible day and out of who knows what passes in front of the stoning and grabs a rock and throws it at the condemned woman. From there one thing takes to the other until there is such an endng that is slightly unbelievable but I enjoyed it.
• The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today, Byung-Chul Han. I really enjoy reading Han but sometimes he has this concrete, dry, way to say things. I read this book in one go. I remember that I was about to finish the book and they were going to close. They came to tell me: sir, we are abou…but I raised a finger like in, shhh, almost done. They waited for me like two minutes to close. I laughed and thanked them and they were like: this dude…
• Clean, Alia Trabucco Zerán. This book is translated from the spanish and I did not realize until the end…Its the strory, as told by the main character, of a woman that becomes a live in service lady of a rich family. This family has a daughter that is a child and is an obnoxious spoiled child…until the main character can’t take it any more and…well, you know. I enjoyed this book. I hated the family.
• Hokusai’s Fuji, Katsushika Hokusai. These is a book showing all the painings of Mount Fuji by Hokusai and some essays on it. I enjoyed it. One thing that I found quite interesting was the infinite confidence of Hokusai. He kept saying: when I am X years old I will be infinite, a god, a master of perfection in paining Mount Fuji.

The reason why I know exactly which books I read there is because I have a list of all the books I read. I use goodreads. I started to use good reads like ten years ago or something like that. I think I opened it some one or two years before moving to Toronto. I started using it precisely because I kept forgetting which books I read, so I figured it would be a nice thing to keep the books there. However, they have this “reading challnge” which consists on picking a number of books you propose to read that year. For some time now I have challenged myself to read 20 books each year.

I have consistently done that challenge since 2016. Let us see what did I do:

• 2016: Read 15 out of 20 books. The books I read were god (of course I had forgotten which ones…). From the list I can see my favorite one was The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness, Lori Schiller. This is the semi-novelized biography of the author which developed schizophrenia when she was a teenager and recovered almost a decade or a decade and a half later due to the progress of drugs that could help. I talk a lot about this book because once she is recovered one day she says she missed the voices and looks for them and finds them…she freaks out. She says: I can very well find the voices if I look for them. I repeat this to myself, whatever the voices might be at each time.
• 2017: Read 16 out of 20 books. Interesting books I read this year. However, this year I discovered one of the books that is super close to my heart. Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age!, Kenzaburō Ōe. Oe had become an important author for me some years prior because of his way of writing and topics of exploration. There is disturbance in his writing and I really appreciate that. Well, this book has to be one of my top three books in my entire life. It is an incredible, albeit difficult, book. I read it in November of that year because I was feeling very anxious. November in Toronto is a difficult month many times because the lighting and weather change abruptly and tasks and chores increase. It is a crazy month an it had a way to getting to me. So, to distract myself intelligently, I chose to read that book.
• 2018: 13 out of 20 books. I read a lot of books on suicide this year. I found Edwin Shneidman, the father of suicideology (there is such thing) and I read many of his books. Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind is probably a book that stayed with me by several of the powerful interviews it had. It is in this same year that I read my first complete book of Zizek, Event. A book that made me roar in laughter but made me think a lot as well.
• 2019: 20 out of 20 books. This was the first time I achieved the goal. I remember feeling very proud. This year I continued reading books on suicide and pain (my physical accident was being difficultish here). I remember veyr much In the land of pain, Daudet, where he explains about how his pain mixes with his literature and renders it useless. But Daudet was a good writer so it is very precise. I also read here Human Acts, Han Kang, which is a book that was very sad and intense. And a phrase stuck with me: That’s when you died, Dong-Ho. Ah yes, Han Kang can be brutal. I have read six books by her by now, and she is always very impressive, but I think for me so far the book that really got me is this one. Human Acts.
• 2020: 7 out of 25. I got cocky that I could read 20, so I increased it to 25…and well it didn’t work. My reading was quite affected by the pandemic because I could not go out to the bookstores! More suicide and Totem and Taboo by Freud. Freud is a haunting writer, what an ability to mistify with what he says.
• 2021: 13 out of 25. Still insisting on 25…In here I read many interesting things but the book that takes the win is The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing. It is an INCREDIBLE book but it has a part where the brutality is cosmically comicall that I laughed as a primitive man. It is a laughter that noone should hear. It broke all my expectations. What a book! I still go back to that part and read it.
• 2022: 7 out of 12. I was allowing myself to do one book a month only. I remember telling myself, it’s okay to chill. The book I remember the most was Getting Lost, Annie Ernaux. I found it fascinating. I had to go out of my way to find the book “fast” because, after she won the nobel prize, it became difficult. I also remember reading The Sense of an Ending, Barnes. What a bad book. I rarely say this, but this book is beyond appaling. Predictable and flat.
• 2023: 17 out of 20 books. This year I read a lot of poetry. I really enjoy poetry. And the book that impressed me the most this year was All the Flowers Kneeling, Paul Tran. I found his poetry outstanding. A lot of poetry of minorities (whatever the minority) people focuses, obviously, on the fact of being a minority. Of course that is all right, but sometimes when they write poetry that overcomes the poetry itself, and is just boring flatness that rhymes. However intense and cathartic it was to write it, it is not really captivating. I found that Paul Tran managed to do it.
• 2024: 18 out of 20 books. I read good books this year and yet, however, the one I think was the best of all is The Dark Forest, Liu Cixin. It is the second book of the triology of the three body problem. It managed to surprise me and to be very enjoyable. I also read The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared, Randall Sullivan which is an oda to stupidity. It starts really good and I was enjoying it. But when his conclusion is that the devil is planning his return in Mexico City because that’s where the Aztecs commited canibalism and nonsense like this one has to wonder what the fuck.
• 2025: 18 out of 20 books. Definitively the book that I enjoyed the most this year was Exhalation,Ted Chiang. I really enjoyed the books of suicide I mentioned earlier too. However, Exhalation is really good. It is a collection of short stories of science fiction. They are very well written. The one named Exhalation (which is the second story of the book) is really good!

Almost all of the above occured in Toronto because I had bookstores and libraries and friends that read and recommended things.

Now I am in Beijing. There are bookstores and I have gone to them, however, all is in Mandarin (to be fair is not all in Mandarin, some have sections of books in English but is very limited). So I can’t read anything. There is a bittersweet feeling at the fact that I’ve lost, at last momentarily, the option of going to a bokstore and pick random book and read there, leave it, return. Or buy it. I can’t read the character.

Which bring me back to the question? Would I prefer to read or would I prefer to speak it? There are people that can do one but not the other. Of course, this is imprecise…you cannot read without speaking it, but what I mean is that you can say sounds and nobody understands your pronunciation in Mandarin because tones and rythm drown you. So, you know what you have to say but it doesn’t come out in a way you understand. The other direction is way more common: a lot of conversational chinese lectures focus on this, you speak and are able to communicate but you cannot read. Some postdocs that are fluentish, speakingwise, have told me they cannot read.

I really wish for reading because I want books! For the mean time I will have to survive from buying online and going to the sections in english. I do practice my characters and I hope I improve…for the mean time, this year I have set my challenge: 20 books in 2026. Who knows from where will I get 20 books I can read.

I had a mission today: go back to a certain goverment office to pick up my passport. Some days ago I went there, together with another of the employees of the Yau Center, to make sure that my R-VISA gets updated to a Residence Permit. Today this was ready and now I can live and work in the Yau Center. Finally! We are not finished with steps, of course. Now follows to…wait for it…fill in more forms! Next step: sign the contract. Then, maybe, before I turn 40 I can get a place to live and get an office, we shall see.

This office was far away. Some 20 Km away from my hotel and I had t book a Taxi. When I was in the taxi the driver told me something. He asked me a confirmation about whether I was the correct person to get the taxi. It is similar to when we ask for an Uber and he say our names, to confirm all is correct. Well, here what they tell you are the last 4 digits of the cellphone you are registered with in WeChat (because I am using DiDi, the taxi app, via WeChat.) He said ni you #### ma? [The numbers are redacted out of security, of course.] I said Dui dui. But in truth I wasn’t sure what he said, but I have been actively trying to make sure I actually get what people are telling me and how people pronounce things. My vocabulary is not great yet, more on this later, but due to this I started to meditate: what did he say? I repeated it on my head and it clicked. Oh, he is saying ####. I checked my phone and indeed I had understood correctly the numbers. Thus my affirmative answer was correct. I was the right passenger. It made me happy that we move slowly, but we do.

***This writing is interrupted for the urgent task of buying mian baos with mian bao lady before she closes***

We are back! As I was alking outside of the hotel I heard a random sir say: wo yau che wu fan. Which means I want t at lunch. Maybe he said wan fan, which would be dinner. I am slowly getting some phrases here and there but it is definitely not perfect. However, as I was hearing this I meditated on how strange it is to adapt to a new language. I dominate English pretty well. I will never have native level of course, I did not grow up with English as a home language, but I can do anything important and nonimportant with it. Of course, it wasnt like this always. I studied English for some 10 years approximately before I stopped having lectures in the language. By then, I started reading books in English because Math is mostly written in English. Then after that I lived ten years in Toronto. I have had all emotions in English.

The period of learning English feels like another life. I remember how much I struggled reading short stories and not understanding anything about them. My listening was atrocious as a kid. I am not completely sure how did it change. When I arrived to Toronto for the first time, in the Fields Undergraduate Summer Program, I was worried I was not going to understand anything or struggle. But no, everything was rather smooth in this regard. There were challenges, but English was not one. Thus, it feels so strange to be in a period of slowly improving a new language. According to online sources, it takes 6 years of stuy to become fluent in Chinese. I have been studying one so far. The little victories feel like lamps that shine randomly in a very ark night but that are enough to hint at a bigger structure that you are not yet prepared to see.

I had decided to get some baos but this time I also wanted a boiled egg. I wanted to ask for it, with my voice, as opposed to pointing with my fingers or so. This is a strange process: the passage, from the primitive cave man that throws words and hopes those are enough to be understood, to the one that can form sentences. While mianbao lady was picking up the baos she was not looking at me. In that moment I said: wo you yige jidan. I want an egg. She was not looking at me, so I’m sure she didn’t see when my hand betrayed me and pointed to the eggs. However, she said hm hao. And gave me an egg. I felt elated because she understood what I wantd without any drama, repetition, show. It was a casual thing. It is so peculiar to celebrate ordering a boiled egg, but if I will read literature in Mandarin one day…

While I was waiting for the mian baos to be warmed (I had already been given my egg) I was looking at the menu. There are some things I understand but I already knew of them before coming here. It’s the classical stuff: chicken, pork and beef meat. This was lesson one of my Mandarin classes. The first thing we would do was to say fast a story and part of it was to say these words. These stories were checked: we had to try to say them many times until we could say them under 2 minutes, sometimes under 1 minute. I remember trying that story and it took me aroun two hours to say it under two minutes. I sent the recording to some friends that speak Chinese and they told me: the tones need working but I get it.

This being a very important thing: the speed of talking. My professors explained to me that tones are very important but that context is also very important. Thus if you are able to speak fast and more less correctly, the tones can be infered from context. However, for that you need speed because otherwise the spacing between syllabes without tone avoids context forming (because you cannot recognize anything at all spoken slow). My professor would tell me: fast, fast, speak speak! What do I need to do for you to speak fast. Oh he would scold me. I practice saying things fast and then sometimes I get understood and sometimes I don’t.

While I was looking at the menu I sau something: four characters but I recgnized only three. Rou San ??? bao. I saw the character and sincerely I didn’t recognize it but I remembered the dumplings. Rou San Xian Jiao Zi, the dumplings of three delicacies. I said: this gotta be xian and these are the corresponding baos. I checked in my online dictionary and indeed, the character I was missing was xian. This is a menu entry I did not arrive to China knowing. I did not know Xian as a character or word, nor knew the concept of this dish. Fascinating. However, I didn’t order these dumplings because I had already ordered the other ones.

Back to my trip to the goverment office…I was paying a lot of attention to the characters because I am trying to become one with them. I have a book with the most common 800 characters of the langauge. It conforms the 77%, according t the book, of the common written language. Thus, it makes sense to learn them properly. I decided this will be a one year objective. This cannot completely be rushed and it needs systematic progress. It is totally doable, but I need to work on it. I had already started this book, so I have done up to chapter 4 but I am going to review the first four. Each chapter has several characters, it teaches you how to write them, pronunciation and some stories to remember them. However, now I live in Beijing and there are characters everywhere! Thus I have decided to introduce:

CHARACTER GO!!!

I will actively go and look for the characters of the corresponding chapter in the wild (gotta find them all!). I grew up with pokemon. I was in thrid year of primary school, so I was proably 8 years old or similar, when it was aired for the first time in México! I remember we were all very excited to watch it for the first time and when it came out we were all Ash Ketchum! And we loved Pikachu and we knew the 150 original pokemón. Now there are like 20 million of pokemon and I have lost track.

I was in Toronto when Pokemón Go appeared in the world. Everyone was catching Pokemón and I found it interesting. However, one day I heard that some people found a Magmar in their stairs. Magmar lives in living volcanoes, people! Why on earth are we finding Magmar on the stairs? I remember I was almost offended by it. Of course, the question is about whether I expected people to go to a volcano to find a Magmar and my answer is: no but maybe…actually yes? I do expect some reality about it? In any case, at that time (we are talking 2016) I was thinking many things and several of them converged, this being one of them, into me developing a story: The Majestic Dragon Sauce. It took me almost a year to develop the whole story, with appropriate ending, of what I hope will be my first (and maybe only?) Graphic Novel. [I cant do everything. I create stories, I will create them forever, but I can’t draw all…but this one I might, we hope.] Thus, because of this Pokemón GO is close to my psyche. Thus, thinking on characters I thought it made total sense to do this. I shall report on my progresses as we go and find those characters!

In any case, because of Character GO I was paying attention to see what I found. When we were arriving to the goverment office I realized there were several things around the place I hadn’t notice the first time. In particular I saw there was an art museum next to the office! So random, but if I have stamina for something is for museums. Thus I went to the office and picked up my documents and then I went out toward the museum. It took me forever to find the entrance. At some point I was like…maybe I shall give up, there seems to be no entrance. But I felt bad at that thought: one cannot be giving up at life. Thus, paid more attentions and finally entered the place.

I walked inside and a woman came to me. She said something in Mandarin to me and I blanked. I did not understand what she said. I said: Wo bushuo hanyu. I do not speak mandarin. I said it perfectly. I think it’s the best thing I have ever said. It is an irony. She went: oh! And got out one of those translation machines and wrote something. She explained a process, then saw I had wechat so she came to guide me. At some point I needed to put my name and she said Mingzi and I understood Name. I felt happy I understood that lol. Then I was all set, it was free [I hope because I didn’t pay anything…].

I was not sure what this museum was all about. It was two smallish floors and there seem to be solo exhibitions. This means that on each floor there were works of a single artist. I entered to the first floor exhibition…Do this with me. Close your eyes and imagine: you walk, there is darkness except for some lights. There is epic music of war anime on the background for some reason. You look to your left and you see two robotic arms shaking two trees as if it was a perreoof Bad Bunny and Daddy Yankee.

Titi me preguntó?

When I entered it was shaking those trees with all might. It really was a: what the actual fuck did I just watch. Then on top of the building were some hanging trees upside down. Evangelion is here. Turns out this exhibition was about art, technology, and the role of AI in it. Many of the machines I saw there were AI controlled and because of it there was something of unexpected in it. These trees could react to th environment: if the observer approached it went smoother, or stopped. If you were far it made tantrum.

The epic Anime music came from an installation where you were asked to imagine the human works with a humanoid in fixing a space station. There were images of debris and space and an arm moving a human robot. And it moved it and at some point this humanoid was infront of me extending his arms, as if embracing me in a lovely hug, and I swear despite there being no face it looked at me.

The first robot to offer me love.

I wanted to take these videos and pictures for the blog. Thus I needed to ask permission. I have not found a museum where they don’t allow you but I guess it is better to ask. I checked how do you say “take a photograph” in my dictionary: paizhao. Thus I wanted to say: Wo huibuhui paizhao? There was this young guy working there. I approached: ni hao! wo hui bu hui papaya? [I didn’t say papaya but to give you an idea of how much I flunked.] He smiled and say EEEEH? I smiled and showed my dictionary and he gave me an enorous smile and said Keyi! (you can) and gave me the three fingers of OK! [you know what I mean right?]. Enormous beautiful smile. It surprised me how happy he seemed. I have heard Chinese people feel very happy when they see you try to speak in their language with them. I don’t know if that is true…I sincerely never had the experience of someone trying to speak with me spanish randomly because they are lelarning and has no option. Furthermore, knowing myself I would be like: yes, whatever. In any case, I felt good with myself for succeding at this task.

I progressed to the museum and reache a wall with several screens on them. They were tablets of some sort. They showed images being generated randomly with some AI following instructions. Those instructions were parameters and it produced a lot of images. I read the description and it explained that with AI the artist becomes a master of parameters. The AI explores the infinite amount of possibilities with those parameter and then the artist judges which ones are remarkable. Some other part of the museum mentioned the phrase: there is no art, there’s only artists. However, maybe we should change it to: there is no art, there’s only data.

Art reduced to data science.

At the end of the hallway was another screen, but this one showed the final result. Those that were picked to be the chosen ones of the thousands produced by the AI.

Detective Del Spooner: Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?

Sonny: Can you?

This quote is from I, Robot, the Movie. I don’t think an equivalent part appears in the books. I couldn’t find it.

I don’t think any of the images shown is a masterpiece, but I would lie if I say some did not catch my eye and feelings. Furthermore, from the perspective of thinking that “humans” don’t paint like this…it is true, but then there is cubism, futurism, etc.

After this part I went to the next one which was extremely interesting but not well explained. It protrayed nine independent AI’s living in a maze. It was trying to understand whether they cooperate or if they start attacking each other. It mentioned that most of them go toward cooperation but that eventually some become deviant and start scheme. I did watch one of them killing other. However, I was very confused of what were the parameters, or what did it mean “AI living in a maze” exactly. That sounds almost dramatic but I do not know how much can “AI live in” somewhere. However, the question is interesting. Furthermore, it also showed all the characters in different comics that appeared in the creen. However, it did not explain if those comics go on a loop or if they are also produced and drawn with AI somewhat randomly.

The drawings were pretty good.

This was the end of the AI and art section, or so I thought. I went up and on top of it there were two robotic arms holding a very thin veil. They moved one way or the other and thus made the veil create different sorts of waves. It explained that the robots at some point go together and at others they go against each other. It was pretty cool to see those robotic arms.

I remembered when I was a sixth grader and I took courses in Robotics in my primary school with Lego. My father had bought some computarized Lego which you could program to do things. It had a camera and it could see. The point was to mimic mars exploration. It was really primitive. When I see the robots of today and I think of that. The first robot I saw was in the laboratory of my dad. I can only describe this robot as a giagantic can that looked like a Dalek, like those of Dr. Who. My dad bought them for his students to do his Ph.D. research with it. It was edge of research back in the day (we are talking of 1995!). I so vividly see the Ph.D. students building robot spiders that crumbled again and again under their own weight after a few steps! And today I see robot arms moving a veil to do pretty waves.

I need one to make my bed in the mornings. We are all these robot waving our sheets and never getting at the first time.

In complete contrast to all this very futuristic art, the second section was about a painter Xu Zidi that somehow insists on learning and painting classicaly. His technique was extraordinary. He had portraits of babies, of women, of men, of sick and dead people. He explaines he follows the works and technique of Johannes Vermeer. He painted the very famous Girl with a Pearl Earring.

You can thus imagine the kind of painting the painter is doing. When I moved to the other zone, the topics changed. There were several of the exercises, planifications, changes, etc. that go into a single painting. It was very interesting to see those “exercises”.

Lot of practice and decisions.

The other thing that was in this section were his paintings of trees. I really like painting trees and leaves. Not necessarily realistic, but there is something very honest, and at the same time hard, about painting trees. They can be very majestic, scary, funny, bizarre.

The ways branches split is really hard to convey.

Finally, there was a video of some ten minutes of him. He talked in Mandarin and I could somehow detect some of the words he was saying. There were subtitltes, also in characters, so I could not read all but those I understood I tried to detect in his speech and it somehow worked. He showed there part of his technique. One of the things that was quite impressive is when he is copying one of the paintings of Vermeer. He has the painting in a compputer background, so he can zoom in and check detail, and then in a canvas he is drawing the same painting. It looks very impressive.

And that was the end of the museum. The painting that Xu Zidi was copying was The Milkmaid of which Wislawa Szymborska has a poem.

Vermeer

So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum

in painted quiet and concentration

keeps pouring milk day after day

from the pitcher to the bowl

the World hasn’t earned

the world’s end.

Can someone please explain me how can it be January 10? I arrived here on November 27, time is an incredible thing. A lot has happened since the last time I wrote and it will take me some time to give proper discussion on it! However, today what I wanted to write about is on my first entry of Character Go.

For those that are new, I will explain again what character Go is: it is my version of “pokemon Go” with characters. Now that I am in Beijing, surrounded by Characters everywhere, it makes sense to take that to my advantaje and learn them. When the time to learn to read comes, if I have made progress on this then I will have advantaje. I bought back in Toronto a book on characters.

According to this book, if you practice it all, you would have become familiar with around 77% of written Mandarin.

This book has around 40 chapters, each with several characters. These characters are organized in some way that makes sense. Simpler to complex, as long as possible. Then it also tells you stories to remember the tone, the meaning, its relationship with other characters and the correct way to write them. Some stories are very funny and others are kind of convoluted. Some have helped me, others I don’t entirely remember. The tones themselves require different sort of practice with Mandarin speaking people.

To practice them one makes repetitions. There are notebooks for this.

I have filled many repetitions back in Toronto (homewooooooorks!) and also in Mexico I practiced. Here I have only done very few that I was reviewing.

My objective with Character Go is to recognize these characters when I see them in nature. Also, in this way I see how they are used in other contexts I wasn’t aware of. Of course, I also learned (or remembered) some new words. It is important to have vocabular in Mandarin.

The re a son why it is im por tant to have vo ca bu la ry in man da rin is be cause all sy lla bles are wri tten in their own square and thus you need to de ter mine which way they are put to ge ther.

Of course, in mandarin each syllable occupies the same “space”. It is a square and each character has its own. As opposed to how I wrote the previous paragraph where each syllable (I hope I did the division of english syllables correctly) has different lengths. This causes that sometimes when characters mix to create composed characters they get squashed together. Some characters are quite interesting, others are extremely funny, others are daunting, some are very easily confusable.

For example, the following two are different. Do you notice the difference?

The left one is “tu” (with some tone) which is earth (also unrefined lol), while the left one is “shi” (with some tone) which is “soldier” or “person trained in a special field”.

I found the character on the right because it is part of my position (i.e. postdoc) when written with characters. However, the left one was the first character my teachers back in Toronto taught me. They asked me what did I thought it meant and I said: grave? And they were like: why are you so dark sometimes? The difference is the length of the lower line. In the left one the two horizontal lines are drawn with the same length, while on the right the lower line is definitely smaller. In typography this is always clear, I will suspect that in real life situations sometimes to avoid conflict one needs context of what actually makes sense.

To write mandarin with the alphabet there is pinyin. When I am being taught mandarin a alot of what is given to me is pinyin. When I have been writing mandarin in this blog I use “incomplete” pinyin because I do not write the accent. For example, if I wanted to write the number three in Pinyin I would need to write san1 or sān. If I wanted to write umbrella instead, it would be sǎn or san3. This is how I write in characters in the computer: you write the incomplete pinyin and then it shows the possible characters it could be. It is actually pretty fast one you get the grip of it.

In chapter one we meet 17 characters. For each one of these characters I have, at some point in life, made repetitions of it [remember I had studied up to chapter 4, but we are doing everything completely. Chapter 4 is the first chapter that has a slightly annoying character but that will be further down in the future.]. One and for some two or three pages. Some are really easy and others are more complicated. Furthermore, there is such thing as fonts for mandarin and there are characters in caligraphy. Those are violent. I have had the situation of finding a character written in similar, but different ways, and the difference is just because of the font being used.

Now, to make things interesting, I made a video of myself writing the characters of this chapter for you. I did not put them in the order the book has them, rather I put them randomly (except for the first three) and for some that I wanted together for a specific reason. I have gained some respect for content creators that find ways to record themselves without falling down and breaking the camera in the process. It is not a perfect video because I was holding the camera with my left hand and the marker with the right. For future chapters I shall find more solid recording methods.

I was feeling slightly self-conscious saying this here because there is people on the other side of the room and they can here me…but oh well, if we shall speak this language.

I thought that to find all these characters was going to be very easy but in truth some were complicated to find. Despite being common characters, they are used as part of other characters more, as opposed to alone. Anyway, we found some of them in nature and I want to report on the progress so far. Now I will show you and tell you stories. I won’t show everything I found because then this will get very heavy as not all pictures are that interesting.

The numbers were not the first characters I learned. I think I was already two months in before I learned how to say all the numbers. I needed them to say time, to give instructions, to give my phone. They are mostly easy except for the number seven, which we shall meet at a later chapter.

This is a rock with characters in a garden very close to the place I work. The place I work in has many ponds and parks because the summer palace is right there. I cannot really see all the characters propely, but I can see a yi(一) and a san(三). I think a shi(十) appears there slighty erased but I am not sure.

This is the back of an electric bike. Here you see a mix of numbers in mandarin with roman numbers(?). Usually for making lists they use the mandarin numbers. Outside the metr station there is a list of instructions that go up to nine. You can see here yi(一) and a er(二). Of the other characters present in this image I recognize four more. One of them is bei(北) which means north and is one of the characters that appears when writing Bei – jing in characters (北京). Jing means capital. Thus Beijing is the capital in the norht. There is a capital in the south, another city, Nanjing. And what is the capital of the east? That is Tokyo.

This is put in the stalls in the men’s bathroom. Sometimes it is this phrase, sometimes it is another. I know the characters here and the words but I still struggle to imagine how I would produce this phrase myself.

Translated literally is something like: “Forward a small step, civilization a big step”. Curiously enough, the characters 文明 (wen ming), which mean “civilization”, appear relatively frequently in several places. It is always akward to be taking pictures in the stalls, I don’t want to bring attention to myself in those situations but then the picture is necessary!

This one is a sign in the street. In here we can see very clearly kou(口). This is mouth ñom ñom and it appears there because it refers to the “mouth of the intersection”, i.e where the streets crash [A friend explained this to me]. In here I recognize other three characters. One of those is the very famous zhong (中) because it is used in the name of China (Zhongguo). Then there is also rang(让) which I learned because I did a cartoon with this character. You use this when you want someone to move out of your way: rang yi xia! 让一下! [Tho this by itself is a bit rude, you need to also say excuse me.]

These are signs that appear outside the police stations. Every zone has its police stations. THere are patrols everywhere, mostly helping with fluid of traffic and help with situations. Outside of malls on all doors, on some corners, on peak hours, etc. The character of the chapter we find is bu(不). In that set you can also see xin (心) which means heart and I find it very beautiful. Below you also see the characters for “security” or more precisely “public safety” which is gong an (公安). These characters I learned here.

This one really surprised me. I was walking for food and then I saw this one containing Ta (他). The word ta means him/her (like, not applie to “you”). However, spoken they are pronounced the same: ta, but him is One of the interesting things that happen is 他 while her is 她 that when you speak with mandarin speaking people in english, they confuse a lot he/she and they many many many times mix the pronouns. They say he for a woman, she for a man. This sometimes gets them in a lot of trouble in the land of the free because of misgendering and similar issues, but you see why this happens. In this garbage can the last two characters are the word for garbage, laji. However, I could not find the first character [I will look it in a dictionary but I will explain how this works at a later date!]

These are how stores are. In here we see mu (木). This is inside the campus and is very close to where I usually go to eat. They sell glasses. I know other 4 characters here. The last one dian(店) I like because its like a little guy walking with its cape.

In here we see ji (机) which means machine. I only recognize another character from here (that appears in chapter 3 or 4…) which is zhi(止) which is the verb “to stop, to hold back, forbid”.

I had been struggling to find two characters: the one for “femenine characteristic” nu(女) and the one for sun, ri(日). I found the one of woman in two places, after sitting down to think where could I find it. One was in the doors of women bathrooms, but I didn’t dare to take that picture. What if they think Im a total weirdo. The other was in the maps of stores where they put the men cothes, women clothes, children clothes, and so on. There I found it.

Then when eating in a noodle place I came across to this celebration(not exactly of what) signs and there it was: 日!

I sincerely feel pretty comfortable with the characters of this first chapter. I couldn’t show you ji (几) which translates kind of “how many?”. When I arrived to Beijing I did not know exactly how the restaurant here in the hotel worked. I wanted to ask: at what time do you open? That is a very easy question. But let us think what would be the answer: The restauran opens at 7. So, the way mandarin makes this a question would be to copy everything except the number you are looking for. Something like: The restaurant opens at 几? Thus it is a place holder for small numbers whether to ask for them or to imply some sort of unspecified quantity, like “a few”. In any case, I completely forgot this (and had my teachers knew I forgot how to ask this I would have been standing in the corner for a month…) and I made a super mega convoluted question as if saying: when the time of the doors to open comes, what numbers will be written in your clock? [I’m inventing but to give you an idea.] They gave me a gigantic HUH? and did not get what I was asking. Then I retried saying: wo yao chi!! I wanna eat! And it clicked and they said qi dian. And when I heard this I remembered the whole process and it was like ah yes…

In my defense, the other day I went with a friend to a Korean Coffee. We wanted to know when does it close. She asked and she used the construction I mention. I heard the reply and I did understand the answer: shi dian ban! Which is 10:30. I asked my friend: she said 10:30 right? And she confirmed. Progress.

I have seen 几 used in interesting contexts. For example, to ask what is your age you ask 几 岁? The second character 岁 is sui, which is “years old”. I practiced this with my teachers back in Toronto. This is not the only way to ask for this and is peculiar how there are many ways, maybe some considered better than others according to where you are.

The other time I remember this being used was when, together with other two researchers (both moreless around my age), we went to a seminar in another university close to here. We biked but we were slightly late. One of them had an electric bike so he entered the building first. When we followed a policeman came out of nowhere and shouted at us. He was saying: guys, bikes are not allowed here! I did not get what he said except of jigeren. I remember using this word when we practiced saying how many people live in your home? or How many members does your family has? or How many seasons does your country had? [We were speaking of countries with 4 marked seasons vs those with 2 seasons.]

Next time I talk about Character Go I will talk about those of Chapter 2. I hope I can find some of them in nature that are interesting with nice stories.

When I was an undergrad in Guanajuato it was extremely common that we would go *religiously* to study, gossip, hang out, crash out or have crisis, to Cafetal. This coffee place was very special for the math undergraduates of the period when I was studying. We were in that coffee almost daily. It was so frequent that sometimes the people that worked there would shout: they are coming! The Mathematicians!!

I have a lot of memories from this coffee. I am sure I have forgotten quite a bit of memories. I used to do my homeworks there, hold office hours some times there, I learned to play Go in there, I even had dates there, I made friends there. It was a magnificent place. I have not gone in many years and thus I do not know if they continue to be amazing or no. I actually dream many times that I am in Guanajuato, walking towards the coffee but most times I do not reach there. I just walk, and walk, and walk…

It was very free to live and engage in this coffee place. When there was no place, we would sit with other people that we knew. Without permission even, we would just sit. I remember that when I graduated from the undergrad we all went to the coffee: around 30 people in there and I paid the coffee for everyone! Frappetal mocca for all!! I remembered everyone asked the barista what they wanted and then she repeated the order back to us correctly. I said: a round of applause for the barista that remembered. And we all clapped, and she was so annoyed at me. Fair, fair.

This is the only picture I have of the place at the moment. I am constructing a torus (donut) for some reason, but I really do not remember why. However, I can say, we tried to build a lot of tori in that place. We tried to built a Tonnetz (google it) but it crumbled under its own weight like our own dreams.

The coffee culture that I have comes from the burgois intellectual side of my family. We would go to coffees and sit down there to do things. Draw, write, do homeworks. It wasnt frequent but it wasn’t unfrequent either. However, in highschool a friend of mine forced me (yes, forced me) to go to a coffee place: Café Zapopan. This is happening in 2007, basically 20 years ago (except for a couple of months). The coffee was close to my home and to my school so we would go there very frequently. I continue to go there everytime I am in the city. It is that coffee where I started to develop the habit of studying, reading, drawing, etc in coffees.

Café Zapopan has a unique drink named after them: café zapopan. It is delicious and I cannot describe it properly: it is coffee broth with a not so sweet ball of ice cream on top and with frappe ice. However, it is not really a frappe. It is strong, but it is delicious.

This enormous culture of going to the coffee almost daily to do regular activities became very important to me. One of the most difficult things I experienced when I moved to Toronto was that people around me do not want to do stuff in the coffees. I wanted to go and sit and replicate these activities but it was just not part of what people in a PhD and masters wanted to do. People in a PhD and masters have offices and a lot of work and are very serious people! It became a frustrating thing at the start, however with time I started to find my own ways in a café here, in another there, and of course eventually I found people that did want to go to coffees with me.

The first coffee I went in Toronto was called Bicerín. Bicerín is the name of a coffee drink of Turin from the 18th century. I learned that many of our modern crazy coffees, moccas among them, have evolved from this one by varying the quantities of the ingredients. I found this coffee because another masters student in the department invited me. I wanted friends, I had been in Canada less than 3 months, and I also found him handsome. He eventually left the masters and I havn’t seen him in almost a decade. However, my coffee world started there.

This coffee stopped existing because the owner sold the place (or at last that is what I was told). Then this coffee became Carbonic Coffee in Baldwin Street. I remember the day we realized the place was closed. I had gone to the gym with a friend that morning. We would walk after work out for cafe. We worked out at 7:30 am and we arrive at the café around 9:30 and stayed there until it was time to run for Trace Formula Lecture at noon. Then, one day, we arrived to the place and it was gone. It was shockingly sad.

My friend took this pic of me *defeated* outside this coffee.

The closure of this coffee forced us to find new places. During my period in Toronto I went to a lot of coffees. In each one of them I had different adventures. Let us see:

Bicerin Coffee/Carbonic Coffee: Surprisingly enough, I had a hard time wanting to go back to carbonic coffee because I missed Bicerin. Not only that, but I found their mocca bad at the start. The mocca of Bicerin was really good. However, a friend of mine started to become a good fan of this place and convinced me to give it a new chance. I immortalized this with the following cartoon.

I painted this cartoon in Carbonic. I was doing a series of cartoons drawn at the coffee place.

Another eternal coffee is Future Bistro. When I started going there it was designed differently: cookies and pastires were next to the window. Then they changed it to how it is (or was…maybe it is different now). I enjoyed this coffee quite a bit because it felt a “working place” that also had good, cheapish food, and it had nice bathrooms too [more on this later]. I played chess, had friends meetings, some drinks were taken sometimes, and I had for a while an obsession with their cookies. Their mocca was amazingly atrocious. It was kitch.

The expresso cookies were very expensive. Eventually they stopped selling them and changed them. This did happen to me.

I went to Future religiously during all my Toronto period. Their “Chicken Schnitzel” saved me a lot during the pandemic!

Of course, an unmissable coffee is Ninetails. I went there because a friend really wanted to bring me there because it was closer to his home (I think?). In any case, it became a popular activity for me to walk from my house to there and order an “espresso + croissant” or “mocca + croissant”. I would sit down there and read or meditate. I read a lot of poetry over there. However, what I remember the most was writing my first grant application there. There was some fllowship for international students from the math department but we had to write. I wrote mine but it wasn’t very well edited. I happened to be with a friend and his girlfriend. She had good expertise editing things. She took my ipad and edited: yes, no, uff, no no, do you know the enter key, sweetie? Anyways, she edited it and it was beautiful and I won the fellowship.

Of course we have Green Beanery. This place closed during the pandemic, but it was a staple place. I had a date in that coffee and my date dropped the mocca over me. It was hot, and he was like: well…we already kissed so you can forgive me. I used to tell a legend of this place: one in one hundred moccas is excellent. It is a true legend. I use to go a lot to this place and their moccas were atrocious, but then there was one that was INCREDIBLE. Which is why, in the name of statistics, I kept going.

This is in Green Beanery in some Christmas. I don’t know why this pic was taken but oh well, memory lane.

Other of my favorite places was Manic. The boss barista there is super friendly and he always said hi to me. We would talk about many things. When I told him about coming to Beijing he was very encouraging: ah yes, Beijing is a place to live. They opened a Starbucks right next to the Manic and then it became a challenge…because sometimes I wanted frappe and they would see me walking with it in my hands. Hell has a special place like traitors like you, they would tell me with their eyes. I remember they once told me “really?” because I used their napkins making p-adic integrations. I had the idea there!

The coffee that took the place of Bicerin as my main coffee. The centre of operations was Italians, or more formally known as Think.It. I went there everyday religiously: mocca and cacciatre, with croissant sometimes. They closed a couple of months before I left Toronto for good. It was quite peculiar because they told me: hey, we are closing…and I was like…oh, wow…I’m leaving. It was meant to be. This place holds a special place for me because an anecdote there made me start to draw cartoons more regularly. I have always drawn cartoons but I eventually said: yes, this format of “one page cartoon” is something I want to become speacialist in. So I do a lot of cartoons like this.

I read books there. I gave lectures there. I had dates there. I remember during the pandemic I ordered my mocca and cacciatore by Uber, because of lockdown we could not go out, but the deliveries worked. I would see it said: someone is walking to bring you your order. I felt shame of not going myself but hey, we weren’t allowed. It was also my “office” sometimes: there was a time when an international undergrad, from another school, wanted to try to become a math specialist. He was not sure if he could do it, if he belonged. He was quite unsure of many things back in the day, so he wanted to talk to me (someone told him to talk to me). I told him: why we do not talk over mocca and cacciatore, and in there I pushed him to stay. We had a very long talk on what it means to stay and do math beyond the very serioues people with offices and no time. He now studied the PhD, I think he is close to finishing.

Then of course, there was Coffee Island. I could arrive there walking but I prefered biking. I would pick my bike and bike down Harbord street up to Queens Parks. There cross it toward’s Bay Street and go down, next to the cars, up to the coffee. I would arrive and they would know: spinach fetta and mocca. That spinach fetta was really good. However, this coffee has no bathroom in the place. They have to take you to the bathroom in an apartment place next to it. That is highly annoying sometimes. However, I enjoyed going here for breakfast a lot. There was a period in which I was competing with my PhD advisor/Spervisor to see who would arrive earlier to office…he arrived around 8 am so I would try to be there around those times too. Those days that I had victory I told him that to celebrate I would go to get Spinach Fetta. He made me explain him what was that and I did to the best to my abilities. I read a lot of poetry in this coffee as well, I read some literature. I remember reading something sad that made me tear up and I wanted to hide but I think everyone realized I was crying a bit.

I tried with all my might to read this book. I could never get into it. One day the dog performed. You can see there the mocca and fetta.

Another coffee I went a lot to was Il Gran Cafe in Eataly. Their coffee was okay but what I really liked was their massive chocolate cookie of 7 dollars. I would go there, eat cookie and walk back home. Or after eating the cookie I would go into Indigo and read books (the sugar rush this caused sometimes made me crash in the couch of the library).

There was a feeling of “niceness” and “chic” and “oh my god we can” in this coffe, and then there was this uncivilized phd in mathematics devouring cookies without any class nor manners.

Another classic coffee was Almonds. This place had seasons in which its mocca was the best anywhere and then seasons in which it was really bad. It was on the way to my office so many times I would stop there for my early mocca. I had many memorabe experiences there. On of them was arriving for a mocca and then, when trying to leave, findg there was an antivax/antimask protest outside. I was wearing my mask and so were the people in the coffee. The boss went next to me and told me: why don’t you have a seat, I don’t think you are welcome there. So I sat down to drink my mocca watching the antivaxers looking for freedom.

Importantly, there was a period where I would go to Snakes and Lattes to drink coffee. The reason was that they had a barista that made moccas that were extraordinary. What was even more remarkable was the consistency with which their moccas were so good. Whenever I went there and she was not attending the dissapointment was palpable. I don’t think I saw this consistency with noone else egarding the quality of their coffees. I have fond memories of me walking to this coffee at night and sitting down there to drink my mocca and meditate, study, see people play.

I was very picky with my moccas at snakes and lattes.

Other coffees that were really important for me were the Goldstruck coffees. Originally I would go to the one in Yorkville. The reason I found this coffee was the recomendation that I got that it had the best expresso shots. In the pandemic I started to walk there with the only other mathematician in graduate house (where I lived). We became friends over expressos. Our expressos were at 8:30 pm. Science requires sacrifices.

Later on, however, when I started to read Chinese (yes, I havn’t forgotten this blog is about me coming to China) next to the academy was another Gold Struck Coffee. Eventually I realized that if I wanted to improve my chinese I actually needed to study. To practice. To try to do the work, the homeworks to the best of my habilities, etc. I was very tired: I was teaching A LOT those terms because I needed extra money for emergencies I had. So, I decided that to help myself with this I would go 2 hours before my lecture to this coffee and study chinese. I made repetitions, I wrote than grammar, I read the stories, I made sure I understood decently what was going on. My teachers realized I was doing this so they started to ask me things related to this and around this: Jintien ni zai kaffei ting xuexi zhonguen ma? Ni shi wei shenme xuexi zai nali de? Ni he le kafei, xianzai ni you he lucha ma? [more less: Today did you study in the coffe? Why do you studye there? You drank coffee, now do you want green tea?] I think I improved a lot studying there.

Of course, there are many coffees I am not mentioning (like other 10!): the mello, goat caffe, moonbean, Fika, Le Garmount, cong, voodoo, arch cafe, Film Cafe, Jimmies, the library, dark horse coffee, etc…For me coffee is a place to develop and find yourself and others. Sometimes you really don’t know what you will find.

During the pandemic they checked the residual waters and found high levels of COVID in those of Graduate House. Thus we were forbidden to leave for some days.

I have had opportunity to know coffees in many places. It is almost an instict: when you go to a new city you find its coffees. I have religiously followed this and I’ve found very good places. Now that I am in Beijing this has helped me a lot to feel myself in place.

So far I have four coffees I am going regularly: WDK, the Korean Coffee, Starbucks (giant lol) and Monge’s Caffee. This coffee is inside the university and it varies in its public. I really like going to Monge because it has a big student vibe, after all it is inside the campus of the university. The university has all levels of education: primary, j and highschool, undergraduate and Ph.D. There is every level of people here. I find foreigners learning mandarin, I find young kids leargning their characters and pronunciation, I find highschoolers doing their homeworks. I also see a lot of mentors with their mentees discussing progress. I find couples just sharing time. I enjoy it a lot.

This day it was emptier. Sometimes it is really crowded!

The other day I was in this coffee reading when it started to get really, really packed. Eventually the whole place was full and so people was in the need to share. There are two common phrases I have not really learned yet and I confuse them. One of them is when people ask if they can take a chair that noone is using, the other one is when they ask if someone is sitting there.

That day a child arrived and asked me something and I said no. I thought the kid was asking me if someone was siting there and thus he could take the chair. I said no, because of course he could take the chair. However, what he said was if he could took the chair. When I said no he was surprised, but very respectfuly left the chair there and then…and then…started to profusely apologize to me. Put his hands together, and bowed, said he was sorry many times, and then left. His family started to look for a chair for him. I wanted to tell them to take the chair, that I misunderstood. Wo bu mingbai le! Wo shuo hanyu shuo de buhao!! Waaaaaaaa! [I did not understand! I speak manarin badly!] Then immediately a group of three teenagers arrived and they said something to me. I said no again, I thought they were sayin if someone is sitting there. They were indeed saying this. So they sat there. They said sorry for bothering, sorry, sorry, and sat. I could see the kid looking at me: you monster.

It is part of my routine to go to this coffee now. I go almost daily and so they always tell me: re de mocca. [Hot mocca]. I have studied, drawn cartoons, read, and paid attention to mandarin here. I am quite glad such a coffee exists in the campus because it goes quite well with my way of engaging with the community. More importantly, I have been able to get an office finally and I managed to be put in the Jing zhai building [the principal one]. There is another building outside the campus and farther from all of this. I wanted the one close to the ponds, the trees, the coffee. So now: I walk, get my coffee and then go to the office. I will talk about my office in a later entry of course. However, today I wanted to celebrate this coffee because it has been helpful.

I’ll get an scanner at some point. In the mean time, I do my best with my camera. One of the cartoons done in Beijing in this coffee.

Office spaces are always dramatic. Since I was a child in my family they made an effort to always give me a space to work. Sometimes, if the house allowed, I would have aspace to work by myself other than my room. I have lived in many houses, some allowed for this, some did not. At the same time, I always had this idea in my mind that one must be able to study/work wherever the conditions allow. I got this thinking from the oympiad trainings because many times test conditions do not cmpletely depend on yourself or not even the organizers. There might be noise, the desks might be uneven, or small, or there are not enough pages. I always forced myself to overcome these obstacles. Once, when I was at my parents house, after they had moved of house and everything was on boxes or unbuilt, I had to use an ironing board as a desk for a month.

Through every stage of my math career one way or another I had a desk to work properly: in undergrad I has the office for the thesis students, and before that I was using the office of a professor that had an extra desk for a needy student. In my master year I did not have an individual desk, but there was (baaaack then) a grad room with enormous desks to work for students. I would be there very often. Then in the PhD I had three different desks but all of them were individual. Then in the postdoc I had a great office. These offices were given to me quite fast after the corresponding period started (I mean, a matter of days). As time progressed and I advanced through the academic ladder I started to rely more on my office as a pivoting center. Similar to Saruman and Sauron, Isengard and Mordor. Two different centers of powers with their individual roles and tasks. In particular, for real I became very structured at working for long periods and quite focused in my office and somehow let go of that ability at my house. Of course, if it was needed I can do it, and had the spaces but I really prefered not to. In my home I played games, I explored art, read, or cook and watch movies. I would not really study or work there.

I felt that separation was very good.

When I arrived to Beijing without having a house nor an office to work, it was difficult. I resorted to coffees, which is good and I have always done it. However, in here it was slightly over the top because I had to prepare carefully. For example, if I needed to write things in the computer and focus on that I need to carry the laptop, the connectors, the adapter plugers on top of the books or material I need. Similar if I wanted to draw, I would need to carry it. It was heavy, it was tiring and eventually it became a drag because I would just imagine: oh no, I have to do this…again. I would always overcome, of course, but this extra step of force took its toll and I started to feel tired or slow, and sometimes just unmotivated because of the way this manifested I still did not belong to the place. Given all the other variables, it made me very selfconscious of my foreign nature here.

Furthermore, if I wanted to work where things are already (i.e. my hotel room) it wasn’t that easy. The desk is very small and the bed is gigantic and next to me. It would lure me to take it easy, rest a bit, and then suddenly I am taking naps out of place. Or worse, down the rabbit hole in doom scrolls. Due to the recomendation of a friend I decided to control my youtube habits. I have stopped youtube shorts. I actually realize how benefitial that is. I see youtube, but complete videos that are somehow meaningful to me (for example, som analysis of chess games, or some videos of content creators that I do enjoy to watch [I enjoy very much TwoSetViolin]). Again, I would overcome. The point is not overcoming, is that every extra obstacle like this consumes energy and that energy accumulates and then I am exhausted out of “nothing”.

Of course, habit makes this more mechanical and thus it helps reduce the energy spent and you learn how to do. But to develop a habit in a moment that is so inpredictable is very hard. I say unpredictable because there were a lot of things out of my control. For example, they would need things from me in the university out of nowhere due to the process of me becoming a member. Or the cleaning staff of the hotel would come at different hours of the day so “interrupted” me at different timings. Or th internet that day in the coffee there were events and so I could not use it, and then what? Creating habits living in a hotel is tough, we did what was possible.

Thus, I was extremely happy when I finally was called to finalize the process of becoming a member. I signed contract, obtained my Id card that allows me access to all places I should get access (library, canteens, building after hours, etc). I also finally got an office! My first task was to make the grat move. Wo cong fandian dao bangonzi ban henduo dongxi! I moved all my things from the hotel to the office (all things that belong there…I didn’t move my clothes there, for example). This took me some trips and tomorrow I still have to make one.

Also, I asked if there was a desktop computer I could use. For some reason I have this idea desktops are incredible over laptopt but that is totally unfounded. In any case, thy did have one. They set it up with me with windows, english and chinese language, etc. It is now in my office and will be my work computer. The desk is big, I have storage space, I was able to put some pictures of my friends and family in a board. Now I am trying to go there earlier, work and then maybe go for a coffee for a break and return. The restructure of work can start to happen. I don’t feel I need to carry everything and that I don’t have a space to pivot. It is helping a lot. I already started doing things: wrote some documents I needed to do there. Read and prepared some materials. I confess also that the chair is excellent for naps.

I am not the only one using this office, there are other people but I have not met them. I can see their things tho: some weights, some toys, a lot of stationary material, other computers. And, for some reason, a corner for a cat to play. I wonder if some days someone brings their cat?

Also, what proves I belong to the department is that I now exist in the Wall of Fame of Postdocs:

Every postdoc has a picture. Some have very formal attires, some are posing as their very smart selfs, others are just random pictures. And then there is mine. Let us celebrate, the first great obstacle has been surpassed: I am an official member of Tsinghua University after 8 months of difficult back and forths that required a lot of patience from everyone. I am very thankful for everyone involved in the process because they supported me a lot (and had a lot of patience, regardless of whether my dramas were fair or not at times): parents, friends, staff at YMSC and U of T.

For today, that’s all. If I see the cat, I shall meow!

When one watches an anime or a series in Netflix or so there are the famous end of seasons chapters. Somehow these feel different because conclusions, that have been built up to that moment reach their conclusion, or new cliffhangers are created, and some new directions open and others close. In my undergrad we would say that a day is an “end of season” if it had this vibe of epic feeling, somehow open ended somehow conclusive. Change was felt.

In Beijing to be able to function one needs to have a cellphone that works and has internet. To that end there is everywhere stations that lend you chargers in case you are in need of losing battery. My new unlocked nightmare is to lose my phone in the middle of nowhere in Beijing. It must be terrible. The passport and the cellphone are the two most important things one has here. There are two apps that allow you to function because you can pay through them, chat, book transit, see maps, etc: wechat and alipay. Since day one here I have wechat.

One of the functions of WeChat is that it allows you to chat with other users. It is quite good because it allows you to use it with people outisde the country, as long as they have wechat too. This is how I keep connection with some of the people on the new continent. However, one of the chats that is included in this chats is somewhat official…it has the name “official accounts”. Is like a chat of “forums” and “users” that post stuff. It is not like tiktok, nor instagram or so because it are not onyl videos, nor only shorts, nor blogs or so. Rather is a feed of different things related to accounts that are somehow validated. I don’t really know what that process take, it must not be particularly hard as inividuals going their way have some. At the same time, museums have them, the math centre has them, restaurantes has them. Also, it is shared through all the wechat users, which means that of course somehow the algorithm curates what I receive.

I don’t know how this “Official Accounts”, which is a character in itself, knows what it knows. I receive news from mathematics. That of course makes sense because I work in the math center and thus follow it. I receive news of mathematics, forums or articles people write (almost all in mandarin), some memes related to maths. I receive news about museums, which of course make sense because I follow the museum I went before and thus it links me to this. I receive videos about food because once someone sent me some videos about recomendations in Beijing. There is a content creator, the Beijinger, that goes around restaurantes and comments. He is from Spain (I think) and this time he was recommending tapas. People (i.e. other postdocs) asked me about tapas and I explained, but said those are Spanish dish. I am *not* Spanish. Funny enough they asked me after that: oh, then you know the molcajete. Do people in Mexico eat their dishes in molcajetes? I explained about it. It was nice discussion actually. Back to the official accounts, I also receive an enormous amount of gymbros doing gymstuff: lifting weights, cardio, showing off their muslces while they push up, etc…this one I cannot explain. An entity knows I need gym. An entity knows…And of course, I also receive a lot of nonsense: the ten rules to be succesful, the 20 habits of the best people, etc…Those are in english by the way. Math articles, mandarin, 10 habits for succesful people, english.

I will abbreviate Official Accounts as OA and imagine it as a powerful electronic entity.

OA recommended to me some weeks ago a museum: Beijing Chocolate Museum. It had just open agter three years of being prepared. It seems, if I understood correctly, is a museum associated with a very famous branch of chocolates produced in Beijing (or at least supported by them). These days a friend from Canada is here. She is friend of my linguist friend over Canada, but over there we never really talked. However, she came to visit her family and knew I was here. Thus we decided to meet each other and hang around. We went to bookstores, coffees, we played chess, tried food, etc. When one plays in videogames and goes through levels it is common to have guides that help you, teach you and lead you to unlock your abilities. She became such a figure these days because she understand Chinese well and grew up in China, thus something come more natural (FOR EXAMPLE THE LANGUAGE FEICHANGHAO) and thus could teach me many things.

I told her we need to go to this chocolate museum. That was the adventure of today! This museum is not at walkable distance from me (around 14 km). Not only that, this musuem is on the second ring. Beijing Urban structure is organized according to rings the surround the Forbiden City at its center.

What is constructed on each of the rings has to do with its function. At least that is what the original intention was. For example, the fourth ring which is where Tsinghua deals, among other things, with Technological Development. The above map is what appears in the wikipedia article: rings! Funny enough, each ring has its own subarticle. I find this construction so interesting. All this was also explained to me by several students in Toronto when I told them I was coming. In particular they said: never go beyond the sixth ring. Very Lion King moment when the king explaines the young cub that all that is covered by light is their kingdom but not under the shadows.

When OA gives instructions of where to find the museum it explains that you must get down in Qianmen Station Gate C. Reread that and meditate for a moment. We were going right next to the Tianmen Square and thus secruity starts to get really heavy as you approach. I decided to book a taxi to take me there and the app told me that I could not be dropped in that gate, but that I could be left in Gate G. I accepted. The Didi (Taxi) picked me up and the trip lasted around 50 minutes. There was very heavy traffic at some points and as we approached the gate security, and some army, appeared here and there.

Once in gate G we had to walk to a place, outiside of the controlled region (i.e. on the outside border of the second ring) to a place called Beijing Fun. we were following the map toward the place and then we saw this.

It is quite spectacular and it is the South Gate of the Tianmen Square: Zhengyanmen. I wasn’t sure at that time about it so I asked: oh, what is this? I almost get slapped by the innocence and ignorance. The tourist in me. At some point I shall go over there and explore what lies on the other side, but that is in the future but this is foreshadowing. We kept walking and got kind of lost because there were two floor buidlings created a bit of a maze where many stores were located.

You can see how we explore this maze and then the enormous innocence of myself.

We were really not getting anywhere. At some point it said that we had to go to couryard 5 and we were in couryard 21. The definition they had of courtyard was really confusing not withstanding the counting they had. At that moment we walked in front of a coffee store that a very peculiar vibe.

OH THE TABLES!

I will come to write and draw one day.

We sat there for a long time talking a lot about different topics. We discussed a lot about the experience of moving to the other side of the world. I was explaining my thought process on deciding coming to Beijing: on the one hand, it seemed that was the strongest option if I wanted to stay studying and working in mathematics (and even if I wanted a job related to it). At the same time, it made sense for me to try something new. However, a lot of my peers do not feel desire of coming to China (or Asia in general). It is too far, the language barrier is enormous, leaving love ones for many is very tough because they have lovers, their families, or some even families. Others have mentioned they consider it an unfair sacrifice that noone must be forced to do in this area. To be more precise, it should not be an expected requirement to do math to be willing to go through such an intense change. I have to agree with all of this, in the sense that I do not feel is unfair nor out of place for anyone declining to try this change out of these reasons.However, in my case, I think it was an important step and there is a part of myself that does feel I would have never forgiven myself had I not tried it. I would always have believed I let fear get the best of me. Also, in my meditations, I used to think on so many of my students that did the opposite move. How many of them sometimes spoke to me in broken english, and pointed at words like robots, because they just couldn’t get the language (english). Sometimes I had students that brought other students to translate them live my lectures. They were distracting but I grew patient of them once I learned what the purpose was. And now here I am dancing my way through mianbaos and rousanxians.

Once we were ready to move we asked about the place and we were told it’s closed. A bit of a heartattack but we figured that was impossible: OA had made a big announcement, but it said it was quite new. It made sense people was still not aware of it. Indeed, once we went out and looked for a bit there it was: the Beijing Chocolate Museum. It was my friend, myself and 700 kiddos. The point of this chocolate museum is that the things that it show, on the one hand are made almost exclusively by chocolate and, on the other hand, to show the history of chocolate.

We were given a big page with things on both sides and we were supposed to find stamps through the museum. If you collected all stamps then at the end you get a chocolate. At the start there were incredible pieces.

The White Chocolate dragon was quite spectacular. It moved its eyes. It was hard to get a front picture because I was, literally, fighting for pic spot with twenty children. The smell of the place was so delicious. Chocolate everywhere. Magnificent. I read that the museum took three years to prepare and I can imagine. According to what they explained through the museums they used techniques of clay carving to achieve the shapes. However, you have also to preserve the chocolate. Thus, of course, this chocolate is not for eating! It has chemicals. That did not stop a child that grabbed a little piece in front of us of a statue and ate it. That’s it: we were ready to watch a public execution of a misbehaved child or at least a monumental spanking. But no, they just told him it was *poisonous*. Child will never eat chocolate again.

A spot with a dragon to take pictures. Unfortunately, it was hard to get a spot that did not cover the dragon a bit.

After these dragons came a whole wall carved with chocolate. It was pretty impressive. It reminded me of my linocut stamping/carving lectures where we needed a lot of patience and precision to get desired effects.

This is carved chocolate portraying a landscape. Very cool. I understand the child tho, you wanted to eat everything. The smell was good.

When I entered the museum I thoght it would be particularly cool if they had a model of the forbidden city done out of chocolate. To my enormous delight in the next room they had such a thing and it was magnificent.

The Forbidden City!

I wanted to reach and pick a chocolate. That sign with the happy chocolate tells you not to many times. Many times. Many times. *Poisonous* The forbidden city made out of forbidden chocolate was surrounded by many pieces that were very precise and made also of chocolate that was painted on top. Some really were unbelievable. You could not believe it was chocolate.

Chocolate?

Then there was an historical section where they talked about cacao, chocolate production in different parts of the world and the ancient world. They talked about the aztecs and the mayas. They had a Chichenitza pyramid in a very difficult position to take a picture.

The rest were steps to produce and grow cacao, to create the chocolate, the chemical processes of now and then. It was very dynamic and clearly aimed at children, however, absolutely all of it was in Mandarin so I understood nothing concretely. However, since it was for children I took some pictures of some of the explanation plaques to test my progress on characters and some words.

When this part was over, it was time to go to the upper floor and see the artistics. This time what we saw were “paintings” over carved chocolate. Some were very impressive.

Underneath each one of the pictures were statues also carved from chocolate. There were pandas, a lot of dragons, and some confused monkeys.

wei shenme?

Then we finished the musuem with a crescendo:

There was a huge store of chocolates. So fancy, so expensive, so delicious.

There were a lot of containers with chocolates. And boxes. And chocolate toys.

Chocolate runs in my veins. My mother could not eat chocolate, it was bad for her heart sickness. That did not stopped her on encouraging others to eat chocolate and to go to observe chocolate and let imagination run its course. It was not uncommon that in restaurantes she would order some chocolate cake and observe it to her hearts content and then give it to someone else (ehem…who could that be?). My grandfather, from the side of my mom, was very academic and intellectual but lso firm on convictions. Thus he had a phrase, and I would be told this phrase repeatedly at home: First the rent, then the food and finally books and chocolates. I misunderstood and only heard books and chocolates. I wanted to buy all the chocolates.

There were some very colorful chocolates but each of them was 18 RMB. Of course, if one divides this by 5 to more less get an idea in CAD this gives: 3.6. Each chocolate was 3.6 CAD which is somewhat expensive also in CAD..okay, undefendable…let’s keep going. I didn’t buy any in an ENORMOUS display of self control. *Poisonous*

Then we showed that we had completed the stamps and thus we were given a free chocolate. This chocolate at the start had a 成语, that is chengyu, which are proverbs or adages. They are usually composed of four characters.

A chengyu to indicate floruishing and prosperity. The chocolate it had was quite good.

And then we were done. We walked aroun the area, which is called Beijing Fun, and it was very “classical” of what a foreigner would expect, sort to expect. In other word, this as really created to please the foreigner eye and not really authentic. We went to a bookstore that was there, Page One. It is the same bookstore franchse that is close to where I am living, but this is another location.

I wonder if this is the original one. I am amazed by the collection of books they have in this bookstores. It is incredibly diverse. So many authors from so many countries. I did not have this impression in the bookstores of toronto, nor those of Mexico. For sure you have variety in those but not from so many countries. For example, in the Toronto ones it seemed you can find everything under the sun of USA writers. Canadian writers and some hot ones, but thats it. And you can be satisfied. However, many times I remember I went there expecting to find Kenzaburo Oe, Gunter Grass, Annie Ernaux…these are nobel prizes, so they are famous…but nothing. Or only one book.

Gurnah, the recent African Nobel prize and Annie Ernaux, the French one. The books are also beautiful to hold.

I was really impressed to see this one. Classical books of Mexican Literature. Very famous, but still surprised.

However, give and take…quid pro quo, Clarice. One of the topics of the bookstores with my friend is the search for the famous book: No Longer Human from Ozamu Dazai. This is the one book of Dazai I havn’t read. I shall, I hope, return to Dazai in a later moment because he played a very important role on the last year of me in Toronto. His books helped me come to peace with it in certain sense. However, my friend was looking for a particular translation. Now, I confess, I have never paid much attention to translatins…probably badly but the reason I don’t really realize is that I have read spanish literature in spanish and other literature I usually read it in English, which is not my native language. Thus I do not particularly detect if the translations are bad or strange. However, my friend said that this is very noticeable when translating to mandarin that is very different as a structured language and also the phrases used are very different. Thus, she was looking for the Ozamu Dazai translation by this author because it is a good translation. Funny enough, I read “Life and Death are Wearing Me Out” from Mo Yan in Spanish. That is a book originally written in Mandarin, I think (Wikipedia says “Chinese” as the original language, but that is highly nonspecific.) In any case, I do not remember feeling anything strange about it. The only time I have complaine about a translation was because of a sentence that really made no sense in the book “Cocinar” which is “Cooked” from Michael Pollan. I only had it in Spanish so I read it in Spanish and well…magnificent book with one weird line, so I guess it happens. Thus…returning to the diversity…they have a lot but probably not always great translations. Harold Bloom used to say that Edgar Allan Poe is better in translations and, according to the movie, Luther spent forever translating the Bible due to looking for the exact translatio. We suppose translations really matter. As a fun fact, my friend just told me she ordered the book, with the good translation, in the food delivery app. Sometimes they have books and she got it in a matter of hours. Zuihao! Maybe too much, feichanghao.

We did not want to eat in this zone because it really looks aimed at foreigners and thus it might not be the best food, maybe is more expensive, and also…I live here and she is Chinese…so it made sense we could go somewhere else. There was one challenge tho, we needed to use the subway. When coming to Qianmen Railroad Station she told me the subway was extremely packed. I have seen in videos online in many ocassions how packed subways can get in China, Japan, Korea.

I am no foreigner to packed transport. When I was in highschool and I had to go to the trainings for the math olympiad I had to take a particular bus: 380. This bus goes around the beltway (it was…the city grew). It was used by a lot of people and it was packed. REALLY PACKED. You would be cramped, sometimes you could not get down, or you had to get down and hope to get back in to let others out. It was nasty, painful, hot and sweaty, dangerous. To pay you would pass the money hand by hand to th driver and then the change back to the person that paid. You would go with workers of the factories, with farmers, with people that sold in the streets and also with students of schools, with old people, middle aged people, teachers of the highschools, olympiad kids. Everyone there. In undergrad it was very similar when going up the mountain, sometimes to the degree that people were holding themselves from the door but slightly hanging (this was not thaaaat common…but at least once I was the one next to the door). In the highscool ones, there was a guy other than the driver going back and forth the bus arranging everybody: you here you there, you owe me money, you are good. You going down: baaaaaaaajaaaaaaan!! Every day for five years of undergrad we lost all our pretentiousness in these buses. Sometimes they were so crowded they would not stop to pick up more people and you had to wait for the next one…which maybe would be not so crowded…but it was, so it didnt stop…and now it was too late and life was meaningless so you did not go to class. And in the subway of Mexico city I saw two women slapping each other because each was a ***** and also a **** and so **** and thus **** and also *** and **** and yes also ***, ***, * *** ! * *** **!! * And you would have to go around this fight to get in. Honestly Toronto was heaven in this regard. At least for the uses I had of transportation there was never this amount of people in the routes I had to use.

My friend knew I was not savvy in using the subway in Beijing tho but I needed to learn. So I had to download the other app: Alipay and set it up. I had been avoiding it because I wanted to concentrate everything in one, just for convenience. But its unavoidable. There is a really easy way to use the transport system in alipay and no such thing exist in wechat (or at least nobody has mentioned it and I did not find it at all). it requires several steps…but I pushed throug. I told myself: you know everything, its a beureucracy that flows. So we sat down for a bit and I figured all the process down.

Now I had the tools: chinese phone, bank cards, passport and residency. I had everything to set this up. As if I had unocked a new power given to me by the guide, wo de laoshi! And so we went into the subway and it was good. we talked in the way, it was not particular crowded nor uncrowded. Just regular. Peculiarly, outside the subway some guy approached me and started to beg for money in english. I’ve no money please, and insisted and almost hugged me in a plea. It was like whaaat: please hungry no money, hungry no money. He followed me for a bit and then went away.

We went to a very vivid place where the QR codes were not available. You had to go to the line and ask what you wanted from the different plates that were serving and cooking. Wo you, wo meiyou. It was fun because I have learned to ask some things and to understand others. It is a bit loud sometimes too. Ni you mifan ma? Liange mifan ma?? aaaa? Dui dui liange liangeeee!!!

It was really good!

Then it was time to head back and decide. I was far from home, an hour, and I had decided to take a Didi. Life is easy. And didi is not really expensive…however Laoshi was making the same computations: Didi or subway. Didi was the equivalent of 4 CAD and subway 0.7 CAD. Thus she said, is not so much in dollars, and I said well yes…but self control won and she decided on going subway. Recently I have been thinking on this process of changing coin: oh in CAD it is just this. I have concluded is very misleading because I earn in RMB now, not in CAD. For me those 4 CAD are really 22 RMB approx. It has to be meaured to my unit of measurement. Didi for me was 40 RMB and subway was like 5 RMB…

The reason why I was hesitant is because comodity of course but also slight fear of Beijing Subway. The following are Toronto and Mexico City subway stations.

This is Beijing:

The subway is massive and the amount of people flowing is incredible. Again, as I said, I am no foreigner to going where there are a lot of people and being crowded but this is a massive place where I really ont speak the language and that might be needed…however…one also needs the subway. So I checked: i need to go from where I was (whose name I actually I don’t know but is in the blue rectangle line…line 2 that goes over an ancient wall. Interesting story). To Wudaokou station. It was rather easy: continue in the blue line five stops and then go in the yellow line (line 13).

I decided to do it. We walked together to the subway station and laoshi had to take line 3 and I had to go to line 2, so we got separate at the entry…it was my quest now. So here we go. QR code ready for the passage. Move, move, move because half of Beijing is behind you. Gotta flow. Flowed. Then go to the gates, pick the right direction. Picked.

Dont block the entries but dnt be passive. Move. Move. Move! I even got a seat! Whoah! Some people looking at you a lot saying laowai…wairen…the other. Pay attention to what they say. I did understand somethings xia (measure word) zhan shi (name). Got down at the right place. This was the easy part.

Now I was in a MASSIVE subway crossing and I was following a lot people. The stairs were really packed with people and then we reached the zone where the subways were. There was a guard screaming instructions. Go here, go there, move, know your entrance (I have no clue what she was saying…). And so I got into the train toward Wudaokou station. While I was there we passed throuh a highroad that gave me a view of a highway with cars extending forever in both directions: blue lights toward you, red away from you. And it was in this moment that I felt a burden lifted of my shoulders: I can move. And I felt an enormous sense of happiness…that I almost lose the damn exit. Out out out! And then there I was, once more, in the same zone I’ve around for almost two months now.

Subway transit unblocked.

Tomorrow is my last day in the hotel I booked before coming. I am a member of the university now, I have an office, I have the means to move and pay and exist, I am improving in the language and I can order moccas and shout liange mifan! Laoshi returns to Canada on saturday. I am traveling to another place outside of Beijing tomorrow. The other power house: onto BIMSA for a month!

First season is over.

For the next couple of weeks, five to be exact, I am going to be in another small town 60 km away from Beijing.This place is called Huairou (it is a whole district). In there lies a big centre of mathematics which is quite famous in within mathematicians nowadays. Usually, when you apply to the Yau Centre you also apply to BIMSA. They are very coordinated. Given that I have not gotten a house, and that this zone is cheaper, it made sense to move around here for february while this settles (my reasoning: during the vacations probably campus will not be checking on housing applications as frequently.) I was told I was going to be given some studio and that sounds legit.

On friday I left the hotel relatively early. I had agreed to meet another postdoc in one of the buildings of the Yau centre. It was our first time to come to BIMSA, for both of us, and we were planning to take a bus that goes BIMSA – Tsinghua and back. It is a very frequent and nice service. The bus arrives at 10 am and the drive is around one hour and thirty, or maybe two hours. Well, we missed the bus. Not because we were late but because both of us thought it was a legit big bus and it was rather a little bus. We didn’t see it and we thought there had been no bus. So…we had to take a taxi up to BIMSA. I thought it would be very expensive but in reality it was around 120 RMB (which is 24 CAD). It was quite good price.

Everything happened on the way. We almost crashed, there was traffic, we picked the wrong toll, etc…but eventually we arrived. BIMSA is located in what was before a concrete factory. This factory closed and a third became a sort of univeristy, another third continued to be things related to the factory and the last third became BIMSA. The centre is GIGANTIC and is next to the mountains and nature (but I mean it: next to it). Because of this it is very very cold and windy! The offices are enormous, the vibe is that of an abandoned factory of silent hill. I like it, as a piece of architecture. I do not know how will I feel working there for this short period. However, I shall talk about all of this during the week because I havn’t really gone there to work. When we arrived on Thursday I was shown my office and then I was told ho to reach the place I will be living.

To reach the place I would be living I had to take another little bus to there. This place is in the middle of nowhere for real. This is a suburb of a suburb. To be precise, this is a suburb in a place that is made of hundreds of buildings for housing of different shapes but not a lot of things available.

The picture they give of the place as seen from above. The surroundings are very similar looking but there are other different communities.

It is strange because crossing the street there ar some neighborhoods that look poorer than these buildings I am in. Some restaurantes are on the street, some schools, and there are some hotels and companies and school campus. However, this does not feel like a city kind of place, rather the feeling of intense isolation is strong.

The place they gave me is quite nice: it is a two bedroom dept. It has a bathroom with its laundry and also it has a living room and the kitchen. However, it has “nothing” beyond these thingsexcept for, thankfully, some blankets for the bed. I had been living in a hotel for the last month and a half thus I had nothing to do anything: no cooking utencils, no tools for showering, cleaning…and here everything seems to be very far away. I felt very dejected at the moment because it really seemed another impossible challenge to surmount. However, this one I had to figure out soon or I would face hunger sometimes or be a mess in the house. I felt very overwhelmed for a moment and I was not really very happy. I was annoyed at these challenges I have to face just to have a job that I moreless like and that allowes me to do art as well. This is an unfair comment but in moment in which the pressure really feels like this (pls just imagine being in the middle of silent hill and you understand very little of the language and everything is very far and all around you is gray and fog and very cold.)

I went to explore the neighborhood (i.e. the buldings in the above picture to see what I find). The first thing I saw was a coffee shop. That made me feel more relieved because for me coffee is important. It had a very interesting vibe. It looks like a coffee academy, and it has it in its name, but it actually does have a classroom there, and some nice tables and some rooms for coffee experience. The people there have to deal with many foreigners because a lot of the foreigners that come to work to BIMSA and similar instituions are given a place here. Thus I was ready to flex my infimal mandarin when they spoke to me in english and that was that. Once they can handle you in english going back to mandarin is not possible. However the coffee was really good. I really, really, liked the mocca. That gave me energy.

Then I walked a bit more around the place. They have a 24/7 store where I can buy some water. In here the tap water is not potable, as in Canada, so I need to buy water. This is how it is in Mexico so it was not a new thing for me. I bought the next day one of 5 L of water.

In the centre of the whole neighborhood I saw a gym and I felt happy because I can do exercise. I went and asked how much it would cost me to just pay for a single month. They found this particularly strange, I guess nobody pays only one month. It was expensive compared to what one year usually is but we did it. And once I paid and checked they told me: by the way, we will be closed during February because of the holidays…They explained they would start my recounting after february…but I am not going to be here. I am here *in february*, so they told me: oh…well, just come for the rest of the month. I agreed, no need to argue these things…also they spoke zero english and the communication was complicated via bad machine translations. This made me feel dejected again but I want to do some exercise, there is just one problem: I have nothing to prepare for this. No towels, no soap, no sponge, I cannot really shower without making a mess that I cannot clean or similar.

I told myself to count to ten and then to twenty and thirty and just keep going (basically I said to myself you chose this). I walked around toward the street of the restaurants and try to find something. Noodles one more time, that is the life. However, as I was walking an watching at the places kind of dissappointed…not because they do not look tasty, because they do, rather because I need to make a place function and I understand nothing of and I feel away from everything…anyway, as I was walking I saw a noodle place that had a cat sitting in a window. I decided that was my signal and I got inside. I looked at the pictures and chose xiaomian which is a type of noodles. They asked me if I like spicy food, but they said it and then showed me a pepper and I said dui dui dui. These are different types of noodles, oh they were really nice. Also, if you see them in the picture, they are thin (xiao…small).

I have come back to this place everyday. However, the cat hasn’t been around again. Today was the most peculiar day because I had just walked so much, as I will explain later. In any case, I went in and they told me xiaomian? And I said dui dui but then I saw she had some jiao zi (dumpling) and I said wo you zhege. She wanted to tell me something about them but didnt know how to communicate with me, so she said something but I didn’t really understand and then she said: ni shi naguoren? meiguoren? This was very nice to unerstand because it is literally the first lesson I had in Chinese Academy…so I was abl to say wo shi moxigoren. She asked her computer translator to show me in spanish. She was asking if I like noodles with pork and onions, but it said: cerdo y cebollas. I ate so much, it was nice.

In any case, that friday I went to bed very tired and mostly annoyed at the situation I was in. The next day I went to the coffee shop for another mocca. While I was there I saw another foreigner carrying bags from some supermarket. He was taking care of his kid and thus he stopped in front of the store and I could read from where the bags. I looked for that supermarket online and saw that there were two relatively close, I only needed to walk to them and see what’s up. I put the map an started to follow the root, however, the map didn’t show me a route (there is a way to do it but I always confuse th buttons because they are in mandarin). This time I couldn’t get it to give me the road but I followed the map myself.

This is a labyrinth of constructions. New locations being constructed, roads closed because of the neighborhoods you cannot access (just building after building after building). I tried one way, I tried the other, and despte me walking in the direction of the shop I could not get there. There were blockages of neighborhoods that were unsourmountable.

Once I gave up I was checking the map and realized that, on the other direction, there was another shop. It didn’t look impossible this time because this directon does not have constructions. The things are already constructed. Blocks and blocks of tall buildings. While I was walking toward this promised shop I saw many things to appear: some random shop (not big ones), one stationary, some restaurants. There were not many, but there seem to be some things. Then, in front of me, appeared an older woman carrying 4 bags full of groceries. It was cold and there was unpleasant wind, but she kept at it.

When I lived in Guanajuato, for some period of time I lived on the top of huge alley that was upward. The stairs were atrocious, there were dogs, waste, drunks many times passing out on the street, Sometimes you could get robbed. And at least once there were gun shots. We all would do our groceries in a nearby supermarket and walked heroically up. I remember bringing water up was a drama: we would take turns on who had to bring them. Oh this 22 kg of punishment! I once was stopped by some dudes on a corner who wanted to take my things but when they saw they were just papayas and other fruits they let me go. It was very tired, although it was a good exercise. In other of my houses, I had to take all my bags up to the bus stop and then go up in a bus, sometimes standing, up to the middle of the mountain. Then get down, and carry it and beg there were no angry dogs or bulls. And everytime, you would see an old lady, older than time, walking next to you (and at least once I saw an old man with no legs crawling up the alley).

When I saw this lady with her bags I remembered all the Guanajuato experiences, those I lived and those I saw. I thought this is flat and easy, I can do this. So I walked without much drama until I reached the store. It was 2.2 km from my place (I checked in the map), which is not that much except that it was cold. Once there I got many things: a wok for cooking, some glass for water, some cook utencils but unfortunately they did not have knives(which really limits me!), a cutting board. I also got some chicken breasts, tomatos, potatoes, lettuce, onion. And they had towels!

Unfortunately, they also did not have soap for the dishes and to clean the veggies. In Mexico we desinfect the veggies and wash them when we buy them. In Canada they do not do this, because they are a civilized country that havn’t heard of food poisoning or worse. I remember when I arrive to Canada and I was washing my lettuces, my roomate (which was full on canadian) laughed at me for doing this. Not in a mean way but a bit condescending tone. We third world countries with dirt in the lettuces. In any case, I know my ways to clean and desinfect the veggies, this is not new for me. However…I needed the tools. I mostly use the dish soap of the dishes in the sink and water, and if needed all these vinegar potions of the witches.

The problem was that I could not find the soap. I could not properly wash anything, and on top I did not have a knife, I could not really cook much. That not being enough I don’t know who thought putting stickers in the things you will eat on is a good idea. When you remove the sticker the glue remains stuck…more cleaning! I decided to try my luck with the small stores of the next street and th 24/7 store. In the 24/7 store I told them what I wanted, because I looked for the word, and they checked and they told me they did not have. I had to try my luck in the other store.

Before I entered the store I realized I had to check for the word for the soap because I had closed the dictionary where I looked for it. I checked and went in. There was a very polite lady that was slightly nervous of me speakig because not understanding each others language is a drama for everyone. I said confidently: Ni you XIWANJI ma??? She looked at me somehow perplexed: meiyou, meiyou! I could not really believe it, it looked like the kind of place to have this thing but I went out a bit dejected, when I realized that I had asked for a dishwasher machine…I returned, and she was like oh no…but this time I said xiwanye and she said, hum…but looked more convinced and then I said wo you feizao! This was from the depths of my heart (I want soap!), and she was like: OOOOOOOOOH!! YOU YOU! And she got me some soaps. I got a soap bar and that was good enough for the time being.

I returned home around six that day and I was feeling very tired, so I sit in the couch and I just died. When I woke up it was around 8 pm and I was feeling more relaxed. So I figured it was time to figure out something I have not done up to now: it was time to use the online stores to get things. There are two apps in China that are very important to survive: meituan and taobao (the chinese Uber and Amazon). There are other apps, but these are pretty famous. Everyone I have talked with uses these two and the delivery guys are everywhere all the time. Around Tsinghua its madness, here is not intense but you see them nevertheless, because people in these neighborhoods order things. Groceries in particular are something you can get in meituan, and I will learn how to do this.

However, right now the challenge was to use taobao to get: knifes, a dish dryer rack and some soap for the dishes. These apps are entirely, absolutely and mercilessly in Chinse characters. I had to look for the words of what I was looking for in dictionaries, type it, go through the selections, figure out the ordering process, etc. Luckily must of these things have very good videos of each thing they are sending so that you get an idea of what is going on. Once I had decided on the three things I wanted I put them in the cart and proceeded to payment. I needed to put my address and my name and my phone and everything they asked from me. The problem was that: the addresses I was given in the reception were given to me in characters and in English, not in pinyin. I do not know the pinyin for each character…and without that I cannot put the things on the form.

I coordinated both my cellphones. In one I had the app of taobao open. In the other I had Pleco, a dictionary that also has character recognition that uses the camera. I would point the camera onto a section of the cellphone, to know what I was being asked for, then go to the information with my address and other data and check the answer, and then look it up in pinyin to put it on in the form. This took for ever, really tested my patience, but it worked.

They give you so many options that you don’t really know what you are clicking on. I also don’t know hw to read very well estimated time deliveries, whether it has been sent, whether it is coming here or I screwed up (I think not). It has been really intense to learn all these things. I did manage to order these things. Today in the morning I checked the app to see if it said something. It did, it says they have been sent and you can track where are your thing…they show you a map. All my things are coming from the *other* side of the country. Why are they sending me dish soap from the other side of the country? I don’t know, maybe that’s where the bodegas are…maybe I ordered from there, I do not have the slightlest clue…I just hope these things arrive soon…

Today I woke up around 8 am but was in an enormous NOPE mode so I stayed there in bed up to around noon…it is not good to do that but this is a challenge and sometimes it doesn’t feel one wants to fight it. I got out of bed eventually and went for my mocca, which it was very good one more time. Surprisingly, someone that I knew from U of T passed by infront me and it was very strange. He is one of the foreigners that live here…we talked for a bit. He is going in vacation for a while but it was nice to see a familiar face. In particular, he told me that if I like coffee I should go to a coffee shop in the other nearby town.

I thought it mght be a nice thing to walk over there to see this coffee place. This place was 3.5 km away and today was quite cold. I thought it was closer! In the way you just see trees without leaves, a lot of snow (because it snowed yesterday), the ountains, people go by running or walking, some e-bikes. It is a very particular vibe, it is not sad but isolated. Still in time somehow. Next to the path I was walking there is a river bank with the river frozen or no river at some parts. People play there with the snow accumulated. There were a lot of children with their families.

When I reached this town I recognized it. The little bus from BIMSA to the place I live makes a stop here. They say it is cheaper to live there than in the place I am. It is a town built to resemlbe an european city town. If I understood correctly part of the motivation was to make it to the taste of foreigners, and I think some faculty do live there. Well, I was walking with the hopes of finding this coffee or something to eat. The only way I can describe this place’s vibe is: abandoned amusement part next to a plethora of suburbian house buidlings. Maybe it was the day, the winter, or something…but it was a place I don’t think I would like to live, what a strange vibe.

I was walking and some people appeared here and there. They would look at me, sometimes staring, sometimes “secretly”. I wonder if they were thinking that I was there trying to look for something familiar. I am not european tho, but this looks beyond kitch. There were some places open: windmill cafe, and I thougt in entering but I did not. There was a restaurant of pizza and they had italian music and the lights were so yellow and you could see the tables served with forks, and knives and menus in the table. Road style pizzeria, they said it was. I saw russian, italian, english and spanish places. Most of them with locks, and many places empty inside. Then, in the russian one, a guy kept ringing the bell and noone answered. I wonder how was it when it opened, or how it is when it is in all its glory and not in a gloomy sunday…I mean…even the pidgeons were the Western pidgeons!

Pidgeons at Tsinghua University Campus. They are different.

On my way back I wa thinking a lot on what I enjoy and do ot enjoy doing, because I was meditating on whether, if I were given a job here in exchange of living in one of these towns, would I take it. The pay is good but the isolation seems big. Usually, one hears that the “city people” want to have things to do. This is true, but I would’nt say that is the complete things. Is not about having things to do, but rather to do not have this feeling of being in a place of so much calm that it feels stopped in time. I can understand people enjoying this but I do not know I would like it.

However, I was also thinking in art and in the type of images I like. I like trees, specialy when constracted with buildings as if the trees were blocking the views. There were a lot of these views here. I remembered Cezanne dies of a pneumonia because he insisted on painting where the art was happening, under the storm within the element. I might try to paint something watching one of these views. That said, at these moments I meditate when do I think on math as I think on art and stories? I don’t always really do. I have never been a mathematician that thinks on math on a daily basis, I can spend weeks without math and I dont miss it. In this epoch of productivity this brings a lot of nerves and guilt sometimes, but sometimes I genuinely don’t feel it…and then it changes and I care again. I need a lot of recharging.

Right now I wish I could dedicate myself to make this place function…but I have to go to BIMSA tomorrow and I should figure out how I arrive there. Luckily, they pick us up very close to where the coffee is!

A common view of how it looks around here.

The snow

BIMSA as a place is very interesting. It is constructed in what was a previously a concrete factory and thus it has very factory looking buildings. Cubical, very big, a lot of open spaces and then very close to the mountains. I certainly have mixed feelings about it. I think it is a magnificent place to do mathematics and to work, however, unless you really enjoy the quiet and retired life of particularly quiet suburbs this might be a complicated place to engage. However, for five weeks I will be here I have come to realize that it is probably not so intense but it will require some things functioning.

The very first day I was given my office in BIMSA. It has very nice desks and, even thugh it is for several people, people do not really go because it is the end of the term and a month of vacations is coming. Thus I have been able to be there by myself.

My current office at BIMSA

I had been having certain conflicts with the equipment in my house because there is nothing other than the furniture and, thankfully, the bed sheets and pillows (also thankfully, I have internet). Thus it is not very functional as I received it.

I figured out how to order online. It was somewhat complicated because the whole app is in mandarn characters so I had to interpret them almost one by one. At the end I managed to order some knives, some soap for dishes and veggies and a dish dryer. I discovered, by checking some of the notifications I received that you can track your things in a little map they present you. I saw my things were on the other side of the country slowly moving towards me. It tells me how many days and hours before the delivery is expected. I was told that the deliveries are relatively fast but turn out that for this suburb is slower.

In any case, between yesterday and today I received everything and I was happy because, on the one hand, I have learned to order online in a way that function and, on the other hand, with this I will be able to do some things in my current home in a nice way. Particularly, I will cook…although I need to go and pick up things for it to function. I have also thought that maybe I will get a plant to decorate the place, but maybe this is an exaggeration because I need to leave this place later on february.

Fancy knives. I like them!

Everyone of these days I wake up around 8 am and I have to get out of the bed fast. I put myself in order and fast go down because between 8:45 and 9:00 the bus comes and picks us up. We arrive to the campus around 9:30 and I go to the office. Once there I somehow work and around 11:20 am I go for food, because I do not get breakfast before as it is very early and I still do not have meal prep. The around 12:20 I am back to office and work some way or another and at 2 pm I have my meetings. These meetings have been very interesting and kinda long. Then around 5:30 pm we are done and I wait until the bus to take us to the community. Once I arrive to the comunity I figure out some food, right now I am buying in the community 24/7 store. They have some prepared food. Then I check out the Tata Steel Chess Tournament to see how it is going, I see some live commentary and follow some of the players I like.

I do not completely like this shcedule because I do not enjoy havig to wake up so early and pressured and missing breakfast. I could wake up earlier of course, but then I need to g to bed earlier or I am very tired and I am not really good at this. I am a sleeper at midnight usually, so I find that difficult. But then having lunch at 11:20 is very disruptive to me, I am usually good to go around 10 to 2 or 3 workings and then eating at that time. Very different time schedule here, however, from next week that I do not go to the institute I might use the time as I am used to it.

The way food functions here is in canteens of the university. You pick a tray and grab some of the different types of food they offer and then you pay. I enjoy going to the cashier where they tell me the price in mandarin. Usually they write it down in a page because many foreigners don’t get the numbers, but I do get them so I try to understand without seeing them writing. When there are cents is when it gets difficultish because I have to detect the place where the decimal point is. It is not hard, it is a very clear word: dian (literally point), but sometimes I am not expecting it! The food is nice although I have eaten exactly the same combination the last three days, which I wasn’t planning on it. It just happened and then I realized.

When you move through this campus and see around you see very beautiful views. You also see so many boards, there is a place to write everywhere and you can do a lot of computations on great gree boards. Then when it is late evening, not yet night, it gets dark but the sky still has different blue hues. I have been meaning to paint based on these views.

This is part of the campus and of the part in front, which still is the factory.

I really like this view, a bit ruined by the reflection on the glass. Campus and mountains right there.

One of the selling points of China, as we all now, is the Great Wall (from which the great firewall, which block internet webpages, kind of gets its name from). From BIMSA we are really close to the Great Wall of China. I was explained that some years ago one could acually walk over there and climb the wall, but they considered it dangerous and so the path was blocked. However, one can still walk. One of my hosts told me that he requested an office with a view towards the Great Wall and he got told: well, win a Fields Medal and then you get it. Coveted view!

You can follow with your eyes through the range of mountains next to us.

I go and see the wall everyday. I was told that from the home I am right now there is a close point where one can actually climb it. I might go. Later in the year a friend from Toronto will visit Tsinghua for an academic Visit and he wants to go, so probably then we will be on top of it. Foreshadowing!

At nights I really enjoy the views. I have always liked the dark and walk through it. I am curious to walk at night through the river circuit and back. However, I do not know if it is totally safe or no. I don’t think it is dangerous, however, one never knows. It is dark for real. Also it is very cold! The views when the sun is going out si very nice.

Taken at BIMSA around 6 pm.

Asi I mentioned above there are boards/classrooms everywhere. They really want you to be able to engage. Is not only because of this but also because here there is a big conference every year and a lot of mathematicians are around discussing.

Nice classroom! In the summer and autumn must be great.

The other school where I remember there were very nice classrooms in the open were in Laval University in Quebec City. In the University there are these very nice parks withing the university and in the middle of them there are some classrooms. Not for a lot of people but with some seats and some boards. I was told those are for summer students who in the spring and summer take french lectures there. For the BIMSA case, I really like it except that right now it is very cold to be outthere working and later in the year it will be very hot. Maybe there are few months that work.

Today I had my mandarin lecture so I couldn’t take the bus in the morning. Once my lecture was over I went for my nice mocca of the day. Then I put things in order and then decided to figure out hw the taxi to there works. It was good to do because I realized it acually works very easily. This turned out to be important because today, at night in BIMSA, I was invited to the final term club reunion. Nothing fancy but there is wine, beer, some food, and cakes, etc. However, it happens in the Math Club. It is common for schools to have the Math Club, where students go and practice for olympiads in highschool, or to do problems in undergrad, and things like this. Well, this is a play on the name, because this is a Math Club for real.

This little club is in the upper floor of one of the buildings. I am not sure if it is open frequently but I was told that at least once a month it happens. Today it wasn’t very full because a lot of people have left for vacation, but I’ve been explained that otherwise it is actually very full. This place really surprised me with this.

Just for a bit of explanation: in the first picture, we find the famous equation of Euler

where all the “important” contants of math appear. When I was in undergrad a professors said: well, I don’t know why people get so impressed by this, but okay, yes, some people are easily impressed. It is ne of the first things that one explaines in the theory of complex number. Then what appears in the light squares are some letters with subindices G2, E8, F6. These are names of the tags to classify certain famous Lie groups in mathematics, part of the exceptional ones.

On the other picture we have a find a nice cursive O, which we use a lot for certain objects. We like that letter which is fun to fin as a letter. Then there is a U(hat(g)), where g has a little hat and also is fancy g. This is a notation of some linear algebra of an object called the Universal Enveloping Algebra of the the linear object hat{g}. This Universal Enveloping Algebra is a big tool that is very important in linear algebra that turns out to never be covered in school…somehow everyone finds its way to it. Then the H with superindex k and an X, H^k(X) is the notation of cohomology. Cohomology is one of the deepest ideas in mathematics, and is hard to explain without notations…but it is a way to wrap up information intelligently, which otherwise would be done by complex manipulations of linear algebra. Bun_G is a famous object of Geometry. I have bound it a lot from Geometric Langlands but I myself do not know much of it. The greek letter zeta

is the famous name of the Riemann Zeta Function with one of the deepest and most important functions of number theory (the control of the primes, feichanghao!). P(A|B) is the notation of conditional probability. I remember a friend of mine saying that people are not up to speed with their understanding of conditional probability VS probability, they don’t get the difference. He was always complaining about it. Then the partial symbol with a line, as a crossing of it, refers to the Dirac Operator which I do not know how to explain…I studied some of this in spin geometry in the undergrad, and the dirac operator is the square root of the Laplacian, feichanghao again, but oh well. Important in spin geometry and also in physics. Finally, the C obviously refers to the complex numbers and the h at the centre is the Planck Constant, which is the size at which the universe stops looking smooth and starts becoming granular…whatever that might mean. Finally, those letters in the bottom are Chinese Characters, the first two are shu (number) xue (study), so together it means mathematics. The other four I actually dont know them, I think the thrid one is a version of wu but with some tone and I am not sure.

We are officialy in vacation period. There is no longer a bus to go to BIMSA. I also do not have to go daily there, although I will continue going twice a week. I am happy that there are vacations. I find this peculiar because I have not been intensely working yet as I have not fully started all my duties in the university. I believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that the process of getting settled in Beijing and, for the time being, here is very time and emotionally consuming. In any case, I have around a month to be here and I want it to be the best possible.

Yesterday was saturday and it was going to be the first day of me getting things going here. My first goal was to do groceries ans establish some procedure on how it will work. After meditating on it for some time I concluded that the best is to go twice to the store per week: wednesdays and saturdays. I mostly buy fruits, vegetables, chicken and meat. However, depending on what do I need I might buy one time things. For example, containers. However, I need to be careful of not getting more than I should because I will not be here for so long. Thus, when I go back to Beijing (possible again to a hotel!) I need to be able to get everything back with me or lose the minimum. Thus I get few containers or recycle those that I collect from fast food. There is a store in the community that is a 24/7 convenience, they don’t have that much, but they do have meals for the microwave. I have bought some. I think I will also have one of those per day to avoid over tiring myself with the meal prep and cooking.

It will sound slghtly ridiculous, and maybe it is a bit, but because of my accident, standing up in place for long periods of time tire me particularly. While cooking this is necessary, unless you sit in the chair while doing it, but I chave never been able to do this while using knives et al. Thus, as much as I love cooking if I over do it I get actually very tired. I need good physycial condition to withstand the cooking challenges.

I have experience with cooking and I have improved as the time has passed. I started paying attention to cooking when I was a teenager and I helped my dad to cook sometimes. Back in the day, I was 14 years old, and I would help with dish ideas, with preparatives of pastas, meats and some cleaning. At that moment of time we were a family of two after family dramas that had prolonged to infinity, and thus we were simple. One of the first teaching I got from my dad was on how to use the pressure cooker. We would cook chicken breasts, with several vegetables : potatoes, chayote, carrots and special broth. We would then eat chicken soup with veggies. We use to dip the bread (the bolillo!) in the broth and it was so good.

In other ocassions we cooked spaguetti with tuna and olive oil. Some sort of salads that usually included onions with tomato slices. Later in life I learned to add goat cheese to this and oregano (my greek friends taught me this). I wouldn’t say I cooked well at all, but I could do basic stuff. My most complex dish back in the day was Center-cut beef tenderloin with black pepper sauce. My father taught me how to do it properly and it is delicious. However, I have not done it that much as I did not buy this meat too much. It is expensive!

When I went to undergrad I started to live alone. My parents taught me how to cook some new things that I might need: different types of rice, pasta soup, some spicy sauces. I also had some new machinery: powerful blenders. I also had a terrible discpline for cleaning dishes and, to my chagrin, I had a lot of dishes. So I would go through all of them before starting washing. Sometimes the mountain of dirty dishes was monumental, twide the depth of the sink. More than one the rice went bad inside the pot and the pasta sauce was so sticky one could turn the pot upide down and it would not fall down. A certain part of it was lazyness, of course, but another part was that I was very pressured with school and I couldn’t make my timings match. I was living at that time in a place in the middle of the mountain: in front of me were the bull fields and nature, nature, nature. School was on top of the mountain and the city below it, thus I was far from both. The bus would never stop or take very long. Thus sometimes I wouldn’t return after school there, instead I would eat with friends and then go down to the coffee shops. At some points I decided I should buy less groceries and eat more outside to balance, and it someewhat worked in terms of wasting les food but budget wise was terrible. Thus I would return to buying and trying to make it work.

It took me my first three years of undergrad to more less learn to balance better. I was going to the gym with some friends (but we had terrible structure so it was more showoff than anything else) and playing football soccer and thus we were being semi careful with food. However, what I think was the highlight of my undergrad cooking years was when I was trainer of the math olympiad in the state and for of my highschool students were selected for the state training. Three of them accepted my invitation to come and train at my house classroom for the olympiad. As I have said, this was in the middle of nowhere and we were serious: we would start at 9 am or maybe 10 am, and keep going until 6 pm. At that time we would go down together to the coffee.

Thus we would have to eat. Now, this is happening in 2010 or 2011. Uber eats was not a thing, food delivery existed precariously. I do not even remember my cellphone back thene, it was one of those that onyl had messages and snake game with pixels. No, we needed to figure out food by ourselves. I was the boss and so I decided that in exchange of those three students working, I would cook but we would have to distribute some tasks. One of them had to help me doing the drink: put water in a large waterpot and put flavour to it. Other would have to wash the dishes and other would have to help me cleaning. The adults (lol) i.e. me and a roomate that was staying there for some time, would handle the rest. I cooked pasta, meat, salads, cut the lemons, etc. And we would pick a movie and watch it while eating. We watched so many movies: all the harry potter saga, up to that point. we watched lord of the rings too. We watched star wars. I had two staple dishes: meat tortas, which was meat inside a bolillo with lettuce (this is NOT complex) but somehow when I asked them to cook the meat it was drama. They burned it, they were scaed of oil and fire. They were 16 and 17, I was 21 or something like this. It was hilaarious. My other staple dish: pasta soup with pepper. It was so spicy and good. It was painful, but verything was training. I really liked that soup. To my surprise, some of them told me that once they went to live alone in their own paths they would cook these things while they learned how to do more complicated things.

In undergrad a peer of mine, that was a very good cook, started using the wok. I wanted to learn too, so I went and get myself one wok. I was trying to make a dish I saw in a book: meat with red pepper (pimienta roja!) and then marnated with several spices and vegetables. I remember how hard it was to ind red pepper. Now I think on this and this stuff is not hard to find, Mexico included. A lot of things changed through these years with regards to access. I mean…I remember the first book I odered from Amazon. It took 6 months for it to arrive. SIX MONTHS! And that’s how it was…

The end of my undergrad was a very volatile period with a lot of emotions. I was, back in the day, trying to decide wha type of mathmatician I wanted to be: an addict to mathematics that knows nothing else or one that is balanced and has time for other things. In my undergrad they were very intense with the commitment required to math tha tey expected from us. It was so intense that when I arrived to the PhD in Toronto I found it easy, course-requirements and tests-requirement wise. In exchange of this, a lot of my undergrad peers were very overfocused and consumed just in doing math all the time and nothing else.

In that period I was reading a book called Cooked by Michael Pollan. This book had an enormous impact in me to the degree that is one of the very few books that I’ve reread. Beyond its contents, it convinced me that I should deidcate some time to cook appropriately and to do it correctly. Thus, when I arrived to Toronto I started to give seriousness to this new task. I would cook for 2 to 3 hours each day. Usually from 2 to 5 I dedicated myself to cook, it was very good. I could do it too because I lived very close to my place and all my tasks were very focused around my home. Later in the PhD this became harder to do and I do not entirely know why always. There were seminars I was expected to be in, I was very busy or feeling very impatient, I lost control of this habit of cooking after a couple of time. However, never entirely and I always kept trying to progress in it.

In Toronto I learned to bake bread. I had a decent oven so I could bake from time to time. I bought several books on baking and saw some videos about it as well. Once I baked bread and made pumpking and strawberry jam for the Math Department Tea Time. I also learned to do *bad* rothi, it wasn’t really epic as it should do, but I tried. I did baguettes. However my best bread was the honey loaf. It smelled really good.

It became a tradition of myself to cook once a term for my friends. Usually fice friends would get invited to come and eat the food I cooked. They would bring some drinks or sometimes dessert. These days I would start cooking very early, around 7 am and the food would be ready around 2 or 3 pm. These were pretty epic meals because I would try to do new dishes and try my luck. I would be preparing the menu for two weeks and meditate on what challenges lie ahead.

I think the most succesful one I had was in 2019, when it was my birthday and I wanted to try a dish I have had in Singapore: beef rendang. At that period of time I was als obsessed with Tomato Basil soup. Usually, when there was a game of the champions league I would not cook. Instead I would buy a subway baguette and one of their soups. For a while they cooked Tomato Basil and I really liked it. However, I thought I could try my luch and do it myself. I checked my recipes carefully the week before and prepared. My weakest point in all of cooking are soups. My soups are not great unfortunately, but that Tomato Basil was really good. A friend with standards told me: oh, this is a soup!

When I was going to go to Singapore I had a Malsyian partner-ish. When he learned I was traveling to Singapore he gave me a whole list of dishes I needed to try. I made an effort to find all of them, but I could not find everything, although my list was quite complete. Chendol, Beef Rendang, Nasi Lemak, ABC, etc…I have forgotten all of them (Durian of course). I found Beef Rendang outside the flower gardens and it was really good. That was when I decided to cook it. At the end of the day, the dish that I obtained was not exactly a beef rendang but it was so good. That meal has been my peak meal I think. Unfortunately, all the pics are trapped inside a laptop computer that crashed during the pandemic and that I don’t have access right now to.

Other classic dish that I would do very often for my friends were Chilaquiles. These are a classical mexican dish that is very easy to make in a lazy bad way. I have good anecoted with these dishes. In 2022 (I think…) there was a conference in Wiconsin and some friends and myself wanted to go. We drove (and by we I mean them). On the way back, at some point close to Chicago, we were hungry and were loking for a place to eat. There was this town that was taken out of a Silent Hill movie…in the middle of nowhere for real, just farm and corn and farm and corn forever and then the town. We were there and people were looking at us like outsiders. And there was a mexican restaurant with pretty nice chilaquiles. My friends were tasting this for the first time and liked them. So I said…well, I can cook them better! So, one day I cooked them and they all agreed mine were better. End.

Back to China. I want to cook and try new things here but I have not had a lot of chances yet. However, right now I have a kitchen. It is a decent small kitchen but I like it. Unfortunately one of the burners is not that good. Also, this is a fire and gas burner as opposed to electric ones they had in Toronto. I heard that undergrads in Tsinghua Daxue rooms cannot have kitchens because of hazard of them burning everything or having accidents. I don’t know if this is true but I find it interesting. If it is true, I wonder if something happened at some point.

Yesterday that I wanted to go for groceries I was debating myself on whether I wanted to walk or go in bike. In truth, I wanted to bike and return carrying my groceries in the basket and in my backpack. At the same time, sometimes all the process of getting the bike feels too much, which is ridiculous because it is a triviality. However, when I was thinking on this I told mysef to stop putting obstacles that were not there to myself. Thus I got a bike, that was literally in front of me, and biked. It was very nice, although I continue to struggle to know exactly where I should put the seat. Sometimes I put it too high and sometimes too low. In any case, I biked to the store and got into the store.

I was gathering my vegetables when I saw the following mushrooms.

Black Oyster Mushrooms (I think)

In Toronto I was very interested in cooking with mushrooms. I have not always liked mushrooms, eventually in undergrad I started to accept them. They are pretty legit. In the first years of the PhD I was measuring my calories and having diet carefully because I was trying to get in shape and was tricky, specially with all the accident drama. Making research I was brought into the world of mushrooms and how to use them to get natural protein without fat (or something along those lines, I have forgotten exactly what combination of gymbro idealism got me there). In any case, they recommended the Shitake Mushroom and I started cooking it a lot. I loved it. Of course I liked also the white mushrooms and the capuccino ones. The portobello was a favorite of my dad and of my vegan boyfriends back in the days at the end of undergrad.

At some point I bought a book on cooking with mushrooms and it had a whole explanation on the instruments used to cook mushrooms appropriately. It is a whole science and I wish I could do more about it, but in this life one cannot do everything, specially in the PhD life. I felt I could not really dedicate that much to exploring mushroom world beyond a certain limit. I am not in PhD life anymore and I would like to figure out how to handle these black oyster beauties, but I need to study. Foreshadowing. Feichanghao.

Another thing I saw in this super market was a giant cucumber.

Giant Cucumber next to gourds and pumpkins

I had never seen one. I really looked like a total tourist taking pics of a cucumber in the store as if it was otherworldy. I was very mistified. You can see in the sign the characters 南瓜 (nangua) which do not mean cucumber, but pumpkin. Cucumber would be 黄瓜 which is huanggua. In any case, I did buy cucumbers but not this giant one, but other ones. In here it is pretty common to do cucumber slices with chili sauce, and I want to try it. However, I wonder if I will be able to cook my own chili sauce soon. I need to learn how!

Here it is pretty common to have soy sauce, oyster sauce and dark vinegar. Th only time I have used oyster sauce was when I cooked the beef rendang I mentioned above. Now I wanted soy sauce, but it was difficult because I was in an aisle full top to bottom, left to right and back and forth of bottles and all of them could be anything. I was trying to translate, to try the characters for soy sauce, for vinegar, for oyster sauce. I succeded in some cases, in others it was difficult because characters were non simplified, or because the name were fancy (i.e. epic super stylish soy sauce VS soy sauce), so I would not always see. I was able to detect some oyster sauces, and also its consistency is different so that helps. At the end I gave up and took one that looked good and let it be what it will be. Step by step we learn.

What is this?!

Had my previously learned lessons kicked in and I was more savvy I would have realized that it says exactly there what it is. Firstly, it has a dumpling drawing there (which made me think it was soy to put a dumpling), but there is also the symbol 子. Thus, immediately we know this is jiaozi, and the upper character is jiao. And indeed we look for it and it is: 饺 jiao. Thus we have dumpling 饺子. The lower part we have to decide what it is: is it two characters or a single one. A student of mine, in the mentorship program, speaks and writes Chinese. I was his mentor a year ago and we went together to Waterloo University for a conference. We talked about learning chinese and he told me Chinese Characters must have balance. He told me that was what his teachers told him: they are balanced. He explained to me it took him many years to really get what this meant. I absolutely do not pretend to know what it means, however, whaever it is, if balance means anything, that symbol below has to be a single character built up of two characters, one of which is in itself built of other two. Indeed, this is 醋 cu (i.e. vinegar). I did recognize the ones at the left that say Beijing.

Then I went for meat. They have what they offer in display and you tell them what you want. I point the the chicken breasts and said wo you sange! (I want three). He opened a bag for me and I used some tongs to grabe the breasts and put them in the bag. Then I saw some red meat, ñom, and I picked it (it was already wrapped) and I got it too. They weighted it and gave it to me. I bought some fruits: kiwis, apples, etc. I should have brought strawberries but was unsure yet of how much I was gonna carry back, so I didn’t.

Then I bought some eggs. They have eggs of so many types: blue, green, red and yellow and white. I want to try all of them but I do not know exactly of what are these eggs. In any case, this time I got just a nice bag of regular eggs for me, but I will return for the blue ones. I unfortunately did not take pictures because I was already taking too much pictures as a total tourist and I think people were looking too much…I should not care but I also don’t want to be the obnosioux foreigner. I would like to know where do people do their groceries. I have been told meituan brings you the groceries to your door and that it is very convenient, however, I find it meaningful and fun to go to where the people do their groceries and see around.

I also bought detergent and softener. This was tricky because I did not know how these words are said. However, tis time looking for the word in english, then getting the characters, and looking back to the objects helped. Sometimes it works! Buying is an experience but we improve.Finally, I went to the stationary in the same store. They had very nice notebooks. One of which is a One Piece themed one so I bought it.

Roronoa Zoro notebook!

Finally, I paid. I used my backpack to keep somethings but I needed a big bag toofor the ones that didn’t fit. I grabbed a bag of the veggies and I said Ni you yige da *shook bag* ma? I do not know hw to say plastic bag. She understood and repeated the phrase back to me and then gave me the bag. Now it was turn to return home in the bike! I put the bag in the basket, put my backpack in my back and carried the eggs in my hand holding the handle. It was pretty legit to do this, I am happy I did it in this way.

One expect a more anime drawing with the veggies visible and al cute, but this is how real life is. Just a plastic bag in the basket.

Unfortunately, despite me carrying the eggs separately, they hit my legs sometimes and banged against each others and thus some broke.

Those two eggs could not handle the hit.

Today it was time to cook and start getting a hold on my life over here. I had in my mind the idea of a dish I see a lot here. You see, in here it is very common to go to canteens where they put dishes out in little bowls, you grab what you want and then at the end you pay. I now can go to these canteens in Tsinghua Daxue and I am very excited to start doing it. Unfortunatley they have some timings that might be difficultish to attain for everything but it might help a lot. For example, they have breakfast early, lunch is 11 to 1 or 2, depending where you are, and dinner is 5 to 7 (which is a bit exaggerated I find…but I have dinner at 10 pm…) In any case, the meal one mght be very helpful. We shall see once I am in Tsinghua and I have to develop timings there, so far I am here.

In any case, they have some dishes of beef slices with peppers usually with mifan (rice). I could not get mifan because all the bags were absolutely ridiculous. THEY WERE GIGANTIC. I would never eat all of that rice in the time given in this place. And to carry it back sounds impossible, thus I didn’t buy. I need to check next time if there are smaller bags…ni you geng xiao *shakes rice bag*??? In any case, based on these ideations of mine I got myself to cook.

I cut the garlic in small pieces with the knives. Those knives are quite sharp. I felt quite the foreigner because I learned, watching chinese youtubers discuss chinese, that there is such thing as the Chinese Knife, and that they use it mostly for everything. A big rectangular knife. When I was looking for knives these ones did appear but I thought they were for fancy meat eating, not the national knife. In any case, the ones I got are really very good. I am satisfied. I cut the meat in slices and put the garlic on top of each slice. I thought I should have crushed the garlic and made it paste, but I didn’t have a good crusher and to do it with the back of the knife could be dangerous because they are very sharp. Then I put some 饺子醋 on the meat to marinate it. This is experimental cuisine and who knows what will happen at the end.

The meat was really very good and the knives cut it nicely.

Back in Toronto I used to go for a very long time to a store in China Town. In there they usually had meat slices and I never saw anywhere they sold meat ike that. I used to do my versions of ramen with meat out of those slices. I learned some ways to deal with meat back then and I was remembering.

These knives are serious business.

In undergrad I bought a serious knife to cook. It was really very sharp. I watched several cooks online on what is the best technique to use it. Of course depens on what you are doing but I remember that for mincing the point is to grab the knife by the handle and go up and down without lifting the tip, rather pivoting around it. I practiced this for a while and I somewhat can do it. I was trying to do this and it works very well with these knives.

In Toronto a roomate (which is my friend) and myself would cook together. He likes cooking but hates dishes lol and so, if he cooked I would do dishes and it was nice. We did this in the pandemic period. However, at some point he started using my knife, which is perfectly fine, except that he would cut himself often. Thus, one day that I was getting some cooking tools and I decided to buy for him a metal glove for avoiding cuts. We called it Mithril. However, one of the people that cleaned th depts when new roomates would arrive, thought it was garbage and threw it away…can you imagin throwing away the mithril coat of Frodo?

Then I diced some potatoes, red peppers, cilantro and the shitake mushrooms. I only have a metal wok, which I am not sure is the best because the point of the wok (as far as my limited studies in it go) is to cook thinks at low heat and let meat or so cook on their own juices as they bleed and sweat out of the heat in the wok pot. However, the fire in this burner even in the slow one makes the pot to go too hot, which causes the things to stick fast, unless you put oil or water. I have not used oil for cooking for almost a decade, I simply don’t use it (this started when I was 25 and was taking care of calories and gym progress and all. Was trying to reach 70 kg in weight, I got stuck in 73-74 when the pandemic started…) I usually use water, however, water makes things to bleed in a way that they sometimes get a milder flavour, so I try to use it less in the wok. I had to use it here to make the things not stick and burn.

The wok and its ingredients.

It took a bit, although not much, for the potatoes to get soft and sweet. The meat got very good texture. It was a nice combination. I put a bit more of 饺子醋 and let it simmer (I don’t know if this is simmering or something else…cooking techicisms).

The dish is ready!

This is my first “complex” dish cooked here. It is still limited but I hope I can make other things and, more importantly, to avoid hunger. One of the demons I face since I am a teenager are my hunger pangs out of who knows what disograce in my timings. Sometimes the series of decisions and fates lead me to moments where I am without food and the situation is difficult to get food (example: no dinner, but is late at night and nothing is open. Or no food, but is extremely cold so going outside is tough. Or literally no money to get food. All of these have happened to me at times.) and thus I just weather it through until the next meal is available. This is not good but it happens to me and I really try to avoid it. I sincrely don’t know if I am better or not at it, but I do think I’ve improved. Nevertheless, this demon comes back. I would not call it a disorder because is not me avoiding it or having issues eating or so, is a different thing coming from a disorganization that sometimes is bigger than me. In any case, not trying to diagnose anything or make this dramatic. I am just trying to say, I have had here in Beijing some days without one of the meals, and sometimes some without two and is not nice but I try to avoid it and overcome the obstacles that lead me there.

I am cooking rice as I cook this. Do not worry, the kitchen is right besides me. I have been having an interesting moment mathwise, not exactly because I am currently cooking rice, earlier I was cooking other meals. Today I went grocery shopping. Now that I am living here I do not have that many things to share because not a lot is happening, however there are interesting things that accumulate.

Firstly, even though we are technically in vacation period I am required to work in Beyond Endoscopy. That was the deal in exchange of getting this place for this period of time. I consider it fair and I try to work on BE. However, I am not such a hard worker and many times I get more into my own things: cooking, exploring, drawing, writing this blog or doing other math stuff. I am not always in the mood for Beyond Endoscopy, if I must say the truth. Progess is very slow in this area and sometimes that can be tough.

However, these days I have seen some progress that I had not seen before. We have not had any breakthrough worth reporting, but some ideas have come in and out. Even more so, we were able to do a computation I had not seen before but always had been curious to see what the final answer. This took several steps. One of the things I enjoy is to discuss with Chat GPT about mathematics. It can be a complete rollercoaster of nonsense if you are not careful, but if the paameters are well set, you are careful and the questions are kept around the topics that are more well known it is very interesting to discuss with it. It is capable to explain many things, give examples that are correct-ish and point from time to time things that are new for me.

Talking with the AI we were discussing some issues with volumes of objects. For the nonsavvy, we call those things “measures” as opposed to “volume”. Just as in real life, to measure something there can be different scales (say meters to feet), and there are conversions between these standards. Well, in the area I am working on it is very important to find the measures of certain natural objects. However, two different scales are very useful and important, simultaneously, and the transformation rule (i.e. the “dimensional analysis” to change units) is really really REALLY very complicated and confusing sometimes. It is remarkable how it can get so damn complex at times. Thus, AI was helping me understand some things when it suggested a computation might be done in a particular way that I had not thought. It seems in the literature it is a common thing to handle these objects via certain techniques called “generating functions”. Now, this is not strange, half of what I do has to do with this technique but I had never consider it applied to these volumes because it doesn’t look like a place this can work…but it does. However, it was a nightmare of computations because the change of scales made it confusing. However, I explained to my collaborator about it and he immediately saw how to do it crystal clear with this idea. Then I did three boards of highschool algebra, correctly applied, and finally the answer was there very neat. I was really very happy.

That was half the problem. We also needed another computation in which I was more familiar with and so I was able to more less what the answer had to be. After some bibliography verification on methods I could se this was indeed correct. I am still writing the details carefully, but for the first time I was able to see “the trace of the trivial representation for GL(3)” in the terminology we want. This a priori is not a hard exercise if you do it the right way and extremely messy if you don’t. It was a nice step in the right direction. There is really a lot more to go.

Motivated by these discussions on this topic, I decided to talk with Chat GPT again but now on other math topics that I like. Builings and knot theory. Buildings are some generalizations of polyhedra. To give you and idea imagine the plane tesselated with equilateral triangles. Now, imagine you have a LOT of these planes, as if they were sheets of papers with tesselation drawn on them. And now you glue the papers along the edges so that edges gue to edges, vertices glue to vertices, but the interior of the triangles themselves are never glued. If these gluings are done appropriately satisfying certain rules, we obtain examples of objcts called Buildings. I like the idea of exploring buildings, they are like these worlds where you move and intuition is strange.

In particular, the ways t move in the buildings can be very counterintutive and I was trying to understand how does one do these movements riguoroulsy. Thus I asked AI to explain to me how does one do this and give me examples from the literature. After some back and forth of explanations we landed in a simple example that was really very incredible to me. It was complex enough to show what the problem is in general but simple enought what is the eureka idea that makes all work. It made me a lot to thing and I proceeded to make some drawings on these, and I continue to make them so that it is very clear to me what happened.

Finally, I asked Chat GPT to tell me about bibliography on some other topics related to the above and it produced quite an elaborate bibliography. I checked the papers myself after becausue it is well known that sometimes it invents bibliography it does not exist. In my case it did not happen, I found everything. It actually provided the links itself, but I know in other situations in different contexts (ie.g. bibliography for school syllabi) it just invents things.

I have not written many things down because, in my usual way of working, I think, I meditate, I forget about it, I return to it, and then at some point it just flows and starts to get structured into something. However, this is very inefficient and definitely not how a lot of people work. A lot of people want to write something everyday and they are very fast to write. I do not feel that I can write that much suddenly, rather at some point it flows. However, I am not necessarily stuck. One of the classical complains I’ve heard in Ph.D. was that people did not know how to write, they wanted it to flow linearly in very good fashion and they get blocked out of this lack of linear order. I wouldn’t say this happend to me, I write skip, change, restart, merge, make a mess, and it eventually builds up to something. In the thing that I am picky is in the storywise structure, and that is not always good: it makes things long, sometimes more convoluted that it needs to be. Taking the risk of sounding unbelievably obnoxious and arrogant, I enjoy doing things that have a concrete goal that has a meaning at least for me. Sometimes math work is not like this, one gets projects that can be done but that are not necessarily interesting or seem to have no purpose at all. I wouldn’t say it is about being deep but coming and going somewhere. This stops me a lot because I get bored fast…I push through though…very slowly sometimes. In any case, I am trying to work at some pacce in BE these days and to check some of my work on other areas of math too. I do not think I am doing great, maybe is being to slow but maybe not, is hard to really measure how these things move. Nevertheless, I have math meetings and deadlines!

On the other hand, besides mathematics, I have been working on my cooking. I have been planning what to cook. I was supposed to go yesterday, according to my own schedules, to buy groceries. But somehow things didn’t move according to the plan. I had Chinese lecture in the morning. My teacher told me she can see I am improving in my speaking. I am happy about it but it I do wonder how she realizes this. Even more so, how can these be happening? I do not speak chinese often even tho I am in China! I am very limited to one sentence conversations in my environment at the moment, so I wonder from where it comes from. I do speak a lot of Mandarin around me. A lot, and I do pay attention to how things are said. One word that I have changed how I say it here is thank you “xiexie”. When I used to say it at the start it was very thick, like saying in spanish “CHIE CHIE” but is not like that at all how it. The “xi” should sound more like the greek letter name and its more like “xi-xie”, softer and almost poetic. Then, it took me a while to get the answer they say “bu ke qi”. I had not heard this before arriving to China and it took me a while to get what they were saying to be able to understand.

I have also been learning characters. Unfortunately I left my notebooks for practicing characters back in my Tsinghua Office and thus I was not practicing writing. I learned characters here, I have been trying to learn some words and improve my vocabulary. This has been some recongition and I do recognize some new characters. However, today I got some for this.

They are pretty small but they will do.

One of the big changes, as we have endlessly discussed, is the lack of coffee shops here. Yesterday I was meditating on this because I usually I have my coffee in the morning, after I walk (I have been walking the river circuit and is always 50 minutes. The consistency impresses me.) Yesterday at night I really wanted coffee but there is no other coffee and, on the one hand it was already closed and in the other is always akward to go and take another mocca to the same place…I have done it, but not here yet…thus I decided to look around and see if I could find some other locations. This place is surrounded by different building zones, not all of it is up to date in the internet, and who knows? Maybe there was another one close by. Online it said there were around 4 coffees not so far, 4 to 6 km in the same direction that the store is (the store is 2.5 km). However, it was already pretty late and there is not much lights at night, the bikes do not have good lighting and I do not have light and security vests so biking at night is dangerouns here. Is a lot of highway vibe, in the city of course this is not a real problem.

Today I woke up slightly late but I did not want to not walk, I am trying to make a habit out of it here. So I did go, then I ran fast to get my backpack from the apartment and then went for my coffee. After that was done I was ready to go to the grocery shop because it was time to get some more food for the nex couple of days. As I was approaching the store I felt the impulse of exploration and of keep going just to see if I could, maybe, see these coffees. Thus, instead of turning right to the store I went straight tward th direction I had seen yesterday in the maps. The vibe starts to change as you move, and probably once I was around 6 km in it had changed to a proper suburbian town vibe (not a ghost one). There were a lot of cars, people walking, people waiting for the bus, schools, soccer fields for children. It was nice vibe. I didn’t see the coffees and I did not properly want to explore because I really wanted to g to the groceries, but I am happy I found this place. I need to evaluate a little bit more the geography of the place in the maps I have to give myself an idea of where to go. In the morning I remembered the main instructions but I wasn’t expecting a more vibrant zone. Still mostly residential but definitely intenser.

Then it as time to return to the store and I tried my luck returning through a different path. I wasn’t far and I knew the direction I had to go. I was thinking on this because in games where you need to explore I do get very lost (e.g. Lethal Company zones, I get very lost I never know how to return to the ship). To my surpris, the place where the natural turn would be did not exist, so I had to keep going in a big avenue. There are bike lanes that are enormous so it is not really dangerous, as for example some zones in Beijing or Toronto where you go with the cars and the buses are killing machines. I figured it out but this time something new happened: the app didn’t let me lock the bike. It told me I was out of limits, I needed to put it in a proper parking spot. This confused me a lot because previous time I was able to lock the bike in that same spot. I had to bike to a parking spot, which was close, but it was mildly annoying.

This time I bought less things: chicken, meat, lettuces, apples. This time I did buy the strawberries:

I am trying to make fruit salad for the mornings.

Sometimes in the store there is this guy that follows people to help them measure the fruits or vegetables and put the price sticker for each thing. The first time I went to the store the guy saw all my veggies in bags without prices so as I moved through the store he would run, pick a bag, run back to the weight and put price and bring it back. He didn’t ask me or anything, he just decided to do it. I found it fun. There were some very nice mangos but I did not buy them because I don’t want to over buy food that goes bad and I still do not completely succeed in structure so I don’t always cook as structuredly as I plan.

While I was there I decided I have to try new thing from this new world. Sometimes they have too much that I don’t know. The section of “grains” is otherworldy, but I don’t always know what the things are because the names are in mandarin and also some things I have not seen them before. In any case, I decided to pick something random and go for it.

When I bought this I did not know what this was, tasted, purpose, etc.

It actually tastes very good. It is crunchy. The big black characters are 麦 芽 芝 麻 酥 糖 which get divided in words in pairs: maiya zhima sutang (with some tones). This basically means Sesame_Malt _crunchy candy according to my research online which makes a lot of sense, given the object we are seeing. I tried it and I liked it and I ate three of them and then said the rest for other days because we don’t want to only eat this.

I have been making some research on cooking using Chinese ingredientes and ideas from here. I want to do two dishes: on the one hand I want to try to make the chili oil that is very popular here, for dumplings, for veggie snacks, rice, etc. I found a webpage online that explaines all of this very well and I hope I can try. On the other hand, I want to try congee which is a dish they eat a lot for breakfast and it seems to be very versatile, but this one will have to wait because I still don’t really know what I need. These things are not difficult, is the finding the ingredients (literally in the store in the sea of han zi (characters)). However, to be getting into the mindset I got myself some chili oil sauce already prepared.

It was tasty and it has peanuts in it. If you check it online, everybody loves it.

The characters here are 川 南 油 辣 子. This is Chuannan you lazi. The first is the name of the brand, and as far as I could make brief research, is a part of Sichuan now. Then you is oily and then lazi is chilli (or hot pepper). When I asked for noodles the first time they asked me: ni xihuan la de shi ma? (or something like this, maybe they said lashi, you like spicy food?. La! Spicy! LA!) However, I likes their characcter for LA 辣, because as you can see the horizontal line is a pepper. Many times when writing characters some parts are drawn with other images. I saw similar ones for fire huo 火 where the two extra lines to the sides are flames. I will show it one day once I’m back in Beijing.

This time I got a little wok because the big one sometimes is too much for certain dishes. I decided on getting rice but these bags of rice are humongous, and there are many different types of rice. I got one that looked small enough for me to use it and then moved on. I cooked it today in the smaller pot and it looks good but something tells me is not exactly the way I should have coked it. Another thing that I tried this time was the aisle of spices, they have many but I could not recognize the names. However, I do know how they look so I found pepper, bay leaf, fennel seed and black pepper.

Finally I returned home and cooked the rice, some dishes with chicken, I also tried to do cucumber with the chili oil. It has been good, but there needs to be some improvement on some things. In particular that rice needs evaluating, it tastes good but something is nnot right (I do not mean helath wise, rather on the way).

One of the goals of my next days is to get somethings online and to make some drawings, but I shall leave that to when some deadlines I have go by (i.e. to the start of february). For the mean time I stop here!