Culture Shock

Forgive our lack of posts -- there is a conference going on here and we eat at the hotel buffet, which we think is not interesting enough to take pictures of.
Also, we are suffering from a bit of culture shock. Some of it is caused by China (among other things the fact that we still don't have our boxes nor a paycheck, or the fact that we get very strange objects as thank you's for attending the conference or being session chair) but most of it comes from being in a computer science department full of the most brilliant people all of a sudden. We are not exaggerating. Some of our (first year) students are math olympiad winners and all of them seem to already know more than we do. The other researchers all seem to live for research and only talk about things that are completely over our heads. And we just feel very small and stupid...

Is God punishing me for...

... for having been enjoying the wonderful foods in Beijing too much or for having caused the death of too many ducks during the past few weeks in Beijing? I don't know, all I know is that the food in Karlsruhe SUCKS!!!

At the conference they serve basic pasta, lentils and carrots (catering to the Indians), and knackwurst or chickenfilet in gravy. They are very careful to serve it lukewarm and too make sure that it has no detectable flavours.

Outside the conference, things are definitely way better, but still deplorable. This is the pizza I had yesterday which made me smell for 12 hours:

Not many complaints about the company fortunately, which is saying a lot for a conference of computer scientists.


Tonight I had dinner at a fancy restaurant. I have stopped taking pictures, I am so underwhelmed. Good thing I am flying back on Thursday (I am even looking forward to the airplane food!).

On a trip

I (Anke) arrived in Germany yesterday for a conference. I miss China! Here is the some of the food I have had so far:


Breakfast at the airport -- not too bad actually but sooooo expensive (5,50 euro!).



The food on the plane was the worst I have had. But I did have lots of space, so I could get to my camera and capture this moment for future generations.


Breakfast at my hotel is typically German. I had to eat lots of cheese because it is hard to find in Beijing.

Frans is still in Beijing and will be giving the first lecture for our course in less than an hour. Exciting!

Wow!

We found a great restaurant which is very far from our house (a 4 euro cab ride!!!) but the food is so good. Come visit and we'll take you there.

Unfortunately, the camera was out of batteries, so it would not focus, flash or anything, so the pictures look terrible. Believe us, the food was amazing.

Dinner at our favorite restaurant again

Lunch at some place that served some curry

Mooncakes!

Our department gave us a huge box of mooncakes (each). It's like Christmas (in the Netherlands, not the U.S. where corperation don't seem to be into giving big boxes of things you don't need to their employees) because you see people with bags full of mooncakes all over town.

We are trying to come up with strategies for how to finish all of them, since they are quite rich. We are hoping to give some to one of our building's cleaning people, who live in the basement (no windows...) and are very interested in what rich people like us put into the trash.




This is the mooncake-bonanza at a Carrefour supermarket.

Star Fish and Coffee

On Sunday evening, to celebrate our 300th blog post, we went to the Donghuamen Night Market with the Kreutzer brothers, whom we met on our hike last weekend.

Anke got started right away, and ordered a star fish at the very first stall.


Yum-0. The Kreutzers had some squid-on-a-stick, which I suspect was a lot better.

But then we got to the good things: scorpions!



Surprisingly, scorpions really are not too bad, and so we all had some.



Anke got carried away by the success of the scorpions, and ordered some silk worm. Still smiling when she gets it:


Hmmm, what do I think of this???

Nope. Not so great.

After this, it was just lookie-lookie.

The testicle selling guy was having a great time touting his wares.


Some other exciting thingies that we did not eat: sea horses and sea dogs (whatever they are.)

According to some other website, the long thing wound around a stick is a sheep penis.

Panjiayuan

We had a very busy weekend. On Saturday, we went to the Panjiayuan flee market. We did not see any flees, but we did see lots of antiques, which we, being jaded Beijingers, suspect are most likely fake.

If any of you is in need of a huge statue to brighten up your backyard, let us know and we'll see if we can ship one to you.
After all this "antique shopping", we had a blurry lunch, which tasted not so blurry and pretty nice.

Dinner at Guo Lin

Lunch

When eating our sushi lunch at Isshin, we noticed that we were not the only ones taking pictures of our food. (Actually, we weren't taking pictures at lunch today.)