CHIP 2010 Day 2

Day 2 in China and we woke up to a beautiful morning. It got very bright outside very early! After a good breakfast, buffet style (like most hotels), we got on the bus and have a 6 hours journey to HeFei in Anhui.
The beautiful morning.
To Hefei!

As usual, the people in the buses are asleep and this is one of the few chances for me to read and catch up with my Integrated Photonics. For the internship at A*Star. I managed to finish 2 chapters or so in 2 days!

Then the first stop at 1p.m. was for lunch! Once again, my appetite works itself up.



And I started to notice that every meal we have is accompanied by 2 bottles of beerwhich really delights some of our beer drinking friends.

One interesting thing on the road is there is such a thing as the round overhead bridge:
The bridge connects to all 4 corners and is really cool, I immediately wanted to walk on one!

Well, on with the guided tour first. First stop: The memorial temple, then the tomb of Judge Bao. 包拯 Yep, he's the famous upright judge that has a very long drama series based on him and his famous cases. We are visiting his birthplace!
The Entrance

His statue!

Looks real right?

They are wax scenes of his famous cases.

The 3 different swords are those that cuts different person's head. The dragon one for the emperor's relatives, the tiger for the various ministers, the dog for commoners.



Well, one funny thing we encountered about China is the funny English translation of their signs... here are a few, plus one from day 1.






Those were hilarious when we saw it!
Well, back to the trip, there was a well, called Lianquan Well: There's a story that the good and righteous people who drink from this well will be cured of any sickness. The corrupt will have negative effects!



The place is quite beautiful in any sense, and we (I meant the rest of us who have cameras) are just happy to take the photos of beautiful pictures away. The following shall also contain the real tomb of Lord Bao.




Group Photo!

The General looks not so nice and is shorter than the scholar, reflecting the emphasis of society at that time.


Tomb of the family members of Lord Bao
Going down!
Into a tunnel.

The picture on the side showing the 24 PARAGONS OF FILIAL PIETY.

The tomb itself! The place is surprisingly cooler than the outside and well ventilated.
There's a tower here, where we gone up to the top floor and saw the surrounding scenery. There was some kites that was very high flying too!






And on the way down, there are bells, pictures, etc... many things to see and to explore. I came down earlier to buy the origins of my surname, 黄. It was a letter that later on Lu Chen explained it to me.


Anyway, this is very tired and enough for a one-day-journey's worth. And we had an early dinner.


After dinner, the boys took a longer rest in our newly checked in hotel while the girls just gone and changed something, put some stuffs, and was ready in 5-10 minutes to go shopping! Wow, that was really fast.

The girls are ready to rock and roll.

We, the boys, were just a bit later than them: 15-30 minutes later, couldn't catch up to them and had to move on and on and on....to 女人街 ladies street, after moving across the 步行街 walking street (which is where the girls are, but too bad we didn't knew. So began a 3-hour journey with the goal of catching up with the girls! Just that little did we know it would be 3 hours.

Me in my full gear! Bottle, umbrella, jacket, and scarf. The wind was quite cold! And it did rained, a little.

We had to go through a dark place to get there.
A whole shop for Coke! Sells other stuffs too.
Is there such a word?
Yay! Just got my wish fulfilled! This is after the rest of the boys are resting/eating in McD, and Ronald, Wu Peng, and me gone on and find the ladies street. It turns out that we were too late and the street is largely closed, just a few hawkers, not impressive compared to the walking street. And we had to go back and tell the others the news. The others happened to NOT be in McD! We walked around a little, circled the block searching for them, and it turns out that they were up in the round bridge! Which was the reason I got my wish fulfilled.

Anyway, before taking the cab back, we happened to stumble upon this dumpling shop and since Renny had said (earlier in the day, at the bus) that he wanted to find the most delicious 小龙包, we decided to go in and have a supper!

Another funny translation.
Nice dumplings... there's juice inside it!
Andy's sad cause his dumpling's juice just gone wasted.

After the adventure of the day, I get to fill my bottle with the water cooler in the shop! Yay! And the cab fare back is ridiculously cheappppppppppppp! Really Really very cheap than Lu Chen also don't wanna share the cost of the cab with the other 3 of us. Well there's 12 of us in 3 cabs and we made it back to hotel safely! End of day 2.

NUS Module Review: PC3130 Quantum Mechanics 2

Description:	This module continues from PC2130 and prepares the student for PC4130. The general algebraic formalism of quantum mechanics is presented (Dirac's bra-ket notation). The ladder-operator treatment of harmonic oscillators is developed. After discussing the algebra of orbital angular momentum and the properties of spherical harmonics, the bound states of the hydrogen atom are studied. The algebraic structure of angular momentum is developed with emphasis on the addition of angular momentum. The properties of systems consisting of identical particles, including permutation symmetry, are studied.
Credits:	4
Workload:	3 lecture hours per week 1 tutorial hours per week 0 lab hours per week 0 hours for projects, assignments, fieldwork etc per week 6 hours for preparatory work by a student per week 10 Total

Personal Experience:
I like Prof Oh and his teaching style, one thing you might notice is how slow the module keeps on dragging on something that you think you knew, but do pay attention as it is not so easy in the test as in the lectures.

Teaching Staff:
Prof Oh is a very good teacher, he explains everything and is very patient with the students! I highly recommend you attend every lecture and ask questions frequently.

Workload:
Same as usual, lecture, tutorials no points. But 2 mid terms of 15% and 1 Final of 70%. Do read and understand well for this module.

Content:
2 Chapters of QM from the Griffiths textbook. But don't underestimate it, it is essential that you learn the method properly and seriously to get an A.

CHIP 2010 Day 1

Sorry another extremely long post here.

China Immersion Programme 2010, 11th May to 24th May featuring: Huangshan, Shanghai, and THE WORLD EXPO! The initial advertisement is very hot, so hot that people who just applied one or two days later might not get the place! Well, to be counted as one of the 33 lucky ones chosen to come to this amazing trip, I felt... nothing special then. But if you ask me now, I would say: I'm extremely glad that I went for the trip, and felt just special, just so nice to be in the company of 32 other good fellow Science faculty friends! And also 5 staffs (adults): Prof Liu Ruchuan&Wife, Prof Liu Xiang-Yang, Caroline, and Lee.

Together, the 38 of us met for the first time in the Singapore Changi Airport, and then flew to Shanghai Pudong Airport in a quarter day flight.



From there on, we met our tour guide, Mr.Tang and the driver who came to the Airport and picked us up on the way to...
SuZhou!

On the way to there, I've moved around and talked to the strangers there as much as possible so that they are no longer strangers as soon as possible, and give, I meant really gave the effort to remember and memorize everyone's name. Well, after such a long journey, and still another long trip on the bus, it is almost inevitable that most of the people in the bus slept. We have about 50+ seats for 40 of us (including the driver and guide) and some of us took some liberty of taking 2 or more seats (me?). Anyway, it was clear to me at first, that there are groups of people forming, those who sat together knew each other before this trip and therefore forming small groups of like-people. There are those who are totally new to the whole group and tries to befriend the people beside them too.

As for me.... I knew Chee Kong, Wei Juan, Ivan, Ronald, Benz, Clement, and that's about it... some of the others know me, cause I formed a facebook group for our trip before the trip!
As such, the first person who replied to me in the group, Lu Chen, is to be my room-mate and buddy for the whole duration of the trip.

Anyway if you're too busy looking at the pictures, you can appreciate that it is totally unnecessary to bring a camera to such a trip. Cause everyone else brought it! Ok, you got to make sure that not everyone has such a mindset....and do bring your own camera if possible, it is unfair to leave all the hard work (of taking pictures and uploading to facebook) for them! Well, for my case, I forgot to bring.

Well, anyway look at our first hotel to stay in!


Hua Hua in the photo!

Si Min and Xin Jie in front of a big screen TV!



It was all so ancient China looking style... and the atmosphere..... I got to tell you I'm so conditioned to the notion that cold air=aircon air=clean air, that I initially mistook the cold air in China to be quite clean. It really makes me feel like staying there for a long long time..... (Maybe I'll migrate there)

And the first dinner there...(all the meals are covered: included in the budget) Well, I can feel happy every single meal, every single one.... but not too happy as there are a lot of wasted food left.... not everyone has my appetite for food. Well, on my table I did my best (along with Benz).

Benz, me and Ivan looking at my food frenzy.

This dinner way overcompensate for the initial small lunch we had on the plane.

That lunch was 1/4 or 1/8 of my dinner.

Of course, after that I can't stand properly and was a bit drunken. That's when they wanted to go out to SuZhou and travel and look around the place and take pictures... etc... I was asked by Lu Chen to go (first of many times) but at last, my "prefer to stay at home/hotelness won over, and I just surf the TV channel there (Over 50 channels all dubbed in Chinese, even the English series!). I was watching the 3 Kingdoms that Ruby Lin was supposed to play a character in. There was Liu Bei and Chao Chao, apparently, it was still far from her scene, just that I didn't know then and kept on pursuing the 2 episodes per day whenever I can in the hotel. (It turns out that the episodes that she appeared in came out only after the trip.)

So I missed out on these beautiful sceneries:








Wow, these are much much more beautiful than many of the other things we see in the whole trip. Well, that's it for day 1, for day 2, I'll have to make another post it is getting too long here.

Thanks to Wei Juan, Xin Jie and Ronald for their photos!