First Day

Today was my first day of work the Academy. Guillermo, and the other students (UCLA and USC) met me at the hotel, which is about a 5 min walk from work (the apartments are farther – approximately 45 mins). The Academy has two buildings, one of which is brand new (no more than 4 years old) and another – about half a block away – that is older (someone said it was 50 years old, but the inside seems to be newly refurbished).

Both Guillermo and I have been assigned to departments in the older building. He is going to be working on a water quality project, and I have been assigned to the transportation planning group.

I apparently arrived a bit early, but after some general confusion and running around, I was ushered into a large conference room, where I got to meet some of the people in the group. After a general welcome from the head of the institute, everyone went around and briefly introduced themselves – including me. Then the director had the managers describe their projects and asked me to indicate which project I would like to work on. This was somewhat difficult to do, both because I didn’t want to offend anyone by not being excited by their project, but also because it was hard to tell figure out how the groups and projects differed from each other. (Perhaps the details were lost in translation, but each manager basically said they were working on transit planning and or transit-oriented development (TOD) land use planning.) I tried to be equally interested in each project, and ultimately indicated that I could prepare some case studies of TOD projects in the U.S., as that appeared to be a recurring theme in their work. They seemed to be interested in this and agreed to have me give a presentation this Friday (though this was later, and thankfully, changed to next Tuesday).

I also briefly mentioned that I had done quite a bit of research and work on carsharing, and that I could also include that in the presentation. There was not much response to this during the meeting, but afterwards more than one person indicated that I should focus my presentation on TOD development and not the “taxi research.” So apparently, there is indeed a bit lost in the translation! I will probably still include something on carsharing, as it is a strategy increasingly used in developments near transit stations, and hopefully I will be able to differentiate it from taxis.

After the meeting, I got settled into my office (see photos below), and used my phrasebook to ask for a pen and paper, and later to write a note (in Chinese characters) that “The internet not working. I need a key?” (the translator had left by then, and my small phrasebook does not include the word for password). It’s 5 pm now and the internet issue has not been fixed and it does not look too promising. The IT tech that came up mentioned that they use a special proxy that monitors your usage (at least they are honest!) and that it only works on PC’s. So, I might not be able to get my Mac online – but he said he would look into it, so let’s hope something works out since I can’t really do much on this presentation without being able to do research on the web. (I spent most of today practicing my Chinese and writing this post).


View from my office -- lots of smog!


After the rain.


A few of my co-workers invited me to lunch, and we went over to the cafeteria in the new building. Lunch was served buffet style with bright orange plastic bowls for noodles or soup and silver compartmentalized plates for everything else. Lunch was fairly tasty as institutional food goes. I chose some fish (good but bony), bok choi, green beans, squash, rice and a few dim sum-type buns. Lots of basic chit-chat over lunch and Chinese lessons. One of my coworkers tried to help explain the 4 tones in the Chinese language with me -- the key to proper pronunciation -- and she used these hand signals that were very helpful in illustrating the differences between the tones (particularly the third tone which goes down then up again). I imagine these hand signals are somewhat akin to what a conductor might do, which frankly, till today, just seemed like frantic waving to me. (The Osgood’s are not known for their musical ability. Some might call us tone-deaf.) My lunch partners seemed impressed that I could use chopsticks so well, and were tickled pink with my story about how Americans have watermelon seed spitting contests (watermelon was also on the menu today). There was much giggling after I relayed that tidbit, and I even told them about my special rolled-tongue-as-cannon technique – but alas we were inside and it seemed inappropriate to demonstrate.