Last weekend I returned from a 9 day visit to Beijing. I went there for the PacificVis conference. I left on 18. April in the afternoon, and after a 9-hour flight, where for the first time I had in-flight food that I actually liked (kudos KLM!), I arrived in Beijing. In the plane I met Jack van Wijk and Jing Li who were also going to PacificVis. Because Jack was giving the keynote talk on the conference, they were picked up at the airport, and gave me a ride to my hotel, so I could save myself the trouble of trying to explain the taxi driver where I had to go. This is something I became proficient in towards the end of the week, but on the first day it would have been problematic, since none of the taxi drivers in the city speak any English, and worse, they don’t know the city and never know the address that you show them (even in Chinese).
During the drive to the hotel I noticed how dark and grey everything was. The whole city looked very depressive so I wasn’t very enthusiastic about spending my week there. However after we dropped our luggage in the hotel, Jing, Jack, and I decided to visit the summer palace, which was a big park filled with gates and small palaces built in traditional Chinese style. However one of the big attractions there were Jack and I. The Chinese tourists from outside Beijing are not used to tall or blond people, so they all wanted a photo with us 
. After seeing the palace, we went to have dinner in a famous Beijing Duck restaurant. Jing ordered for us and we started with a squid soup with duck tongue, which tasted much better than it sounds and looks like . After eating the tongues we continued with the rest of the duck which was also very nice. We noticed how cheap it is to have a dinner in Beijing. The dinner was quite fancy and we only had to pay a few euros each.
The next morning the fog, smog and clouds cleared up and with a bit of sunshine the city looked much better! I spent the rest of the week (with varying weather conditions) on the conference, which had some very interesting talks. On Wednesday I had to give my own presentation and the reactions were all very positive. After my presentation I left to meet Markus, who was in China for a different conference, to go to a meeting with Prof. Tianzi Jiang. We were going to show him my work and the software that we are working on in Eindhoven. I was expecting a short informal talk, and when the professor asked if we would like to speak with his students also, naturally we agreed. Then he took us to a lecture room with about 20 students that were already waiting for us and he pointed at the table with the beamer where we could give our presentation. I ended up giving a 40 minutes presentation, for which I re-used the slides that I made for PacificVis, and a live demo of DTITool (luckily I had some programming inspiration the day before during the conference, so now even the spherical harmonics glyphs were fast on the slow laptop). Although I didn’t prepare for this, the talk went very well and I was even offered a job . After my talk we saw a short demo of their work in their lab, and then we left. Markus went for dinner with Prof. Tianzi and his PhD students and I had to run to catch the PacificVis banquet.
I arrived at the banquet about one hour too late and it was already finishing. Luckily there was still some food left but most of the people were leaving. The banquet was a bit disappointing. The location was boring, while there are much more interesting things to see and do in Beijing for a nice social event. So I was happy to hear that the people I shared the table with were in the same hotel, and after getting back to the hotel we tried to find a nice bar in its surroundings. Apparently there are not many pubs in Beijing and we ended up in a billiard place where they serve beer and cocktails. One of the people I was with was Peter and he asked the waiter if the beer was cold since the night before he had warm beer in a different place. The waiter didn’t fully understand and in the end we got a big plate with fruits for free to apologize for the warm beer . The waiter was a very friendly guy and he wanted to know whether we were in Beijing for business or studying. For him those were the only two options so it was difficult to explain him that we are researchers attending a conference. When we thought that we finally made it clear to him, he showed us the business card of his friend who was a professor in law at Peking University and asked if we work with him .
Thursday the conference finished and I spent some days to see Beijing together with Daniel from Norway and Peter from Germany. One night we found a nice bar with water pipes. I never tried those before and it was really cool. And if you combine it with an empty cocktail glass that is still cooled from the ice cubes, you can get nice effects. Of course this is not a new trick, but we had a lot of fun that night. The bar was filled with international people, including a group of American girls (random quote: You’re Dutch… That means that you’re from….. uhm, eh… Netherlands?) with varying graduations of drunkenness who joined us for the beer and water pipe. They had to leave when one of them who had discovered absinthe that night crossed the upper threshold of drunkenness and it became sickness. Not much later we also went back to the hotel because the next day we had more sights to see.
Besides the Summer Palace, I saw the Forbidden City, Tiananmen square, shopping malls that don’t differ from those in Europe, and of course the Great Wall, which is one of the nicest walls I have ever seen 
. I made a lot of photos which you can see on my Flickr page.
The last evening we had dinner in a roast duck restaurant. Peter and Daniel both ordered half a duck and I chose a Chinese meal with beef because I already tried the duck the first night. The waitress seemed worried about our choices and after after some time trying to explain us something, she found somebody to translate. It turned out that one duck would be too much for all of us. Since the duck I tried before was nice, we decided to have one duck and share it with three people. Again the waitress was worried and the translator explained to us that maybe one duck was not enough and we needed a side dish. We chose the beef dish that I had ordered before so after a one hour discussion we ended up with exactly the same order as we started with. Luckily all the food was very good. After the dinner we ended up in a small bar where we saw two Chinese metal bands. It was difficult to tell whether the singers were “roaring” in Chinese or English, but overall it sounded nice . The next morning I flew back to Amsterdam with Peter, who had a flight to Bremen via Amsterdam, and now I am back in Eindhoven working on my PhD thesis and catching up on some paperwork. PHOTOS!
