Almost Famous

Yesterday, Adam and I were featured on a 1.1 minute news clip about foreign students in Beijing!  We were on CCTV 9, which is the English-speaking news channel in China, and we were on twice, at 2 pm and 10 pm.  It was quite a funny experience actually, as they wanted us to wear our white coats to make us look more doctor-y (which we never wear) and they wanted to shoot in the lab part of our institute which neither of us has actually been in and probably will not ever be.  There's a great 20-second part with me pretending to look in a microscope and discussing it with my mentor; the actual discussion was about the debris that were on the fake slide and the meeting we were scheduling for the next day.  haha.



On another note, I have a small collection of photos of Chinese incongruities, which seem to be everywhere here.  As I said in the first post, the institute has a huge shining new front facade and then a bunch of cracked alleyways and dirty piping.  Beijing seems to be full of old and new, modern and ancient, crammed together as the city rushes to modernize but too quickly or somehow wrongly, so that many people and places get left in the past, perhaps hundreds of years ago.  An example I don't have a picture of is that there are loads of shiny new Buicks and BMWs speeding around, and then you turn around and there will be a horse-drawn cart pulling watermelons to sell.  The span of time and prosperity and concept is just boggling.  Here are a few more examples:

The front of the Institute and Cancer Hospital

The backdoor to the institute where I come in every day

Inside the institute right outside my office, complete with exposed wiring, piping, and something
 dripping.  And a fairly exposed 14-storey drop on some floors

A shiny new sports car on a not-so nice street.  The building immediately to the
 right of the yellow sign is rubble and used as a garbage dump.