Thursday, July 31, 2008

A lot has been going on the past month and a half...

As I mentioned last time, I went to China and Korea for a couple of weeks at the end of June. That was pretty cool, my first time in China actually. Everything was cheap there; you could get good meals at restaurants for $5-$10. Also there is a lot of haggling -- it seems you can bargain anything down to 20% of its list price. I got to see a lot of the typical tourist sites: Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Great Hall of the People, the Great Wall. Also our hotel was right by the "Bird's Nest" Olympic stadium so we saw that. Fun trip. The air quality was pretty bad though.

Here are a few pictures (none taken by me):

A nice view at the Great Wall (would have been nicer if it weren't so foggy/smoggy):

Would you like some fried scorpions/seahorses/grasshoppers/etc.?

Doing the Asian squat at the Forbidden City:

Somehow I like this picture of a wheelchair in the middle of traffic. (Also notice the lack of lane markings)

It was funny that despite signs prohibiting it, people were feeding Fanta and crackers to the bears at the Beijing Zoo:

The Olympic Bird's Nest:

So Asia was fun. After I came back, I went to the east coast for Yuan and Jen's wedding, and had a Philly cheesesteak in Philly, and visited some friends in New York. I've got some pictures on Facebook, not sure if you have to be a member to view them.

Then Jace and Allan came to visit me in Michigan. We had a lot of good breakfast food (even though Angelo's was closed for the month of July). We also went flying, which was cool. I got to fly over DTW and see the big jets landing and taking off beneath us.

Since then, I've primarily been working on finishing up my thesis (both the written dissertation and preparing for the oral defense). I'm in the home stretch... I've set a date for my defense and submitted a draft of the dissertation. My defense is in less than a week, and in two weeks I'll be moving out of Ann Arbor, my home for the past six years. Almost done!

Miscellaneous notes:

I went to a Tigers-Dodgers game back in June. It was pretty cool; I went by myself without tickets, planning to just buy the cheapest seats available from the box office. I ended up scoring a great seat like 10 rows behind the Tigers dugout, for only $15 (regular price $42) from a season ticket holder. Best seats I've ever had at a baseball game. Dodgers lost, though -- they came up one run short in their 9th inning rally.

The other day when I was driving, I hit a firefly. Kind of interesting... I was on the freeway and *splat*, hit a bug, which happens a lot around dusk when the bugs are out... but this splat glowed for a few seconds.

Last weekend I got an iPhone! Cool toy. I had to wait in line like 30 minutes, but it wasn't too bad.

Jenny and I are going to Hawaii next month! Looking forward to it.

ephemeris. \e-phem'-e-ris\, n.; pl. ephemerides.
    1. A diary; a journal.
    2. A publication giving the computed places of the heavenly bodies for each day of the year[...]
    3. A collective name for reviews, magazines, and all kinds of periodical literature.
    (from Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary.)