First day in China!

Hello from Beijing, China! Blogger is also blocked here (in addition to Facebook), so I'm virtually logged into the Georgia Tech ISYE lab and working on a virtual desktop :)

Apparently the checked luggage limit for flights on Air China is just 1 bag weighing 20 kg for flights to China. For flights to the United States, you can check in 2 bags and up to 46 kg for free. So the ladies at the check-in desk wanted to charge me $518 for my second bag, because my duffel bag weighed 15.6 kg and they charge $30 per kg overweight. That is completely ridiculous, thats more than my ticket cost! This lady told me that I either had to re-pack my bag or pay to check my 2nd bag. My roller suitcase weighed 19.6 kg and the only other bag that I have to carry on is my school backpack, so I just looked at her and told her that there was no way that I could re-pack my 2nd bag. I ended up pulling out my flight itinerary to show them that I was indeed traveling back to the United States from Beijing and basically had to argue with them until they agreed not to charge me anything for checking the 2nd bag.

Okay, after the fiasco at Singapore's airport, I made it through the Beijing airport (I did lose my trusty Gatorade waterbottle somewhere in the airport though) and got to my dorm at Tsinghua University just fine. I bought a sim card from a vending machine at the airport for $150 rmb, it was very interesting. The taxi ride was almost an hour with traffic, and I just dozed in and out the whole time.

My new dorm room is nice, I have my own room in a 2-room suite with a shared bathroom. I believe Holly is my roommate (she hasn't checked in yet because the group flight does not get in until later this afternoon) and we also have a microwave and water boiler in the room-good for making my morning tea. This is what my room looks like:



I like how much desk space I have here. My desk in Singapore always seemed to be a little crowded, plus I had ants.



The bed is a little interesting since the mattress is pretty thin but its not bad, it reminds me of sleeping on a futon couch. I spent most of the day sleeping since I didn't sleep much on the plane. We were provided with 2 pillows and a much nicer comforter here, whereas in Singapore we were only provided a thin knitted blanket. I put my teal sheets and teddy blanket on the bed anyways, so it looks pretty much the same.



And my room is air-conditioned, which is also nice... we are so spoiled in the US where everything is always air conditioned and we have much higher standards of living.

I'll probably take some more pictures later once the whole group gets here and we go out to dinner and explore the city, so check back for an update later tonight or tomorrow!

Wafer Fab Plant Visit

We took our final exam today in our Supply Chain logistics class! Whew! It feels great to be done with that, and with our group project. My group was Doris, Annie, Michelle and myself and we presented about Apple's supply chain operations in the Asia Pacific region. Hopefully we did well, Annie and I designed our powerpoint with a lot of sweet smart art graphics and charts and Doris interned at Apple so she helped us with the inside scoop.

This afternoon, we went to visit a wafer fab (fabrication) plant at SSMC. That stands for Super Secret Micro Chips.



Just kidding, it stands for Systems on Silicon Manufacturing. We had a short presentation about the company from one of their HR guys, then we got to put on the onesie suits and go into the clean room to see how they actually manufacture the wafers! I wish I could have taken pictures inside, especially of us in the clean room suits, but there was no photography allowed for company IP security reasons.So here are some pictures pulled from Google images to show you what clean room bunny suits look like:



These suits are specifically designed to keep dust and other contaminating particles out of the clean room. We had to take off our shoes and put on the one piece suit, then zip up booties over our feet. We also had to wear hair nets over our hair (even though our hair was under the little hooded part of the suit), latex gloves and surgical masks over our faces, including our nose. After putting on the suit, we walked through a dry air shower to clean us and our bunny suits off one last time before we were allowed to walk into the clean room where all the fabrication machinery was.

This is what a silicon wafer looks like (up close). The SSMC plant in Singapore that we visited today produces around 50,000 of these 8-inch diameter wafers every month. Each wafer takes about a month and a half to produce. I am not quite sure how this plant measures up against other wafer fabrication plants in Taiwan and China, but our HR tour guide was unsure how to answer my question when I asked him that.



This plant in Singapore actually gets the raw silicon from suppliers and then manufactures these disc-shaped things called wafers. Then they process the wafers and add different layers called masks to them to create patterns and miniature circuits. Then they test the wafer during the finishing process and then use lasers to slice a disc into what eventually turns into little microchips that go inside a computer or a cell phone. It was really cool to see the giant machines that looked like supercomputers from the 1980s, run by a mix of people that were dressed in the clean room scrub suits and ancient computers with some sort of GUI software.



This visit reminded me a lot of when my dad took me to Motorola on Daughter-to-work day when I was younger, my dad works in semiconductor design stuff and showed me a clean room when I was like 10. Yes, I'm that nerdy :)

Peace Corps Medical Clearance!

I finally got my Peace Corps Medical Clearance! I got another email today saying that they had updated my Toolkit online, and lo and behold, it said that my medical evaluation was complete and to watch for a letter in the mail :)

A is for Ambiguous PC Toolkit Update

I received an email just about an hour ago from the Peace Corps notifying me that they just updated my Toolkit online... but I am not sure what they have updated? I logged into their website immediately of course and my Toolkit still looks the same, they're still reviewing my medical documentation. So maybe that means that they finally received the medical tests that I did here in Singapore. Those tests better be sufficient and up to their medical standards because I won't be in Singapore much longer and I have no idea what kind of medical care that I will have access to in China. I can't wait to get medical clearance, because that will be just one step closer to getting placed in a program somewhere in Eastern Europe and then getting my official invite to join the Peace Corps!

RoboCup 2010

This weekend, I stayed in Singapore again and volunteered at Robocup 2010! RoboCup is an international robotics and AI competition, it is hosted in a different location each year. There are 4 main divisions to the competition - Soccer, Home, Rescue, and Junior. This year's competition was hosted by Singapore Polytechnic University, so most of the volunteers were college students about my age and the officials were professors from the university.



The RoboCup competition was held at the Suntec Convention Center in downtown Singapore, which took me about 45 minutes to get to by public transportation. I walked about 10 minutes to the closest public bus stop behind our dorms, then took a bus to the Harbor Front MRT train station. From Harbor Front, I took the north-east train to Doby Ghaut, where I switched to the circle train and took that to the Esplanade station downtown. Luckily the Suntec building was right next to that MRT station, so I didn't have to do much walking around by myself downtown.

According to their official website, the goal of the RoboCup Soccer is to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots by 2050 that can win against the human world champion team in soccer. This is a medium-sized humanoid robot soccer team.



RoboCup at Home focuses on developing real-world applications and human-machine interaction with autonomous robots that can assist humans in everyday life. So these robots are designed differently (more bot-looking and less humanoid looking).



One major application of RoboCup technologies is search and rescue in large scale disaster situations. This is just part of the Rescue obstacle course that the robots will compete on.



We hosted Robocup at Georgia Tech in 2007, where I had fun volunteering as a referee in the Junior Soccer division. RoboCup occupied the entire 5th floor of the CRC, which is the only time in my 4+ years at Tech when I have seen the basketball courts completely used by an outside conference. Usually Tech and the CRC make a big deal out of reserving a few basketball courts specifically for student use, but I guess RoboCup just paid the extra fee to rent out the entire venue.

This year I was assigned to help with the setup for the Junior division tables and with Junior registration. RoboCup Junior is targeted at primary and secondary school students, providing consistent challenges from year to year and emphasizing the sharing of ideas in a friendly learning environment. With a few other volunteers, I labeled every single one of these tables for the 300 teams in the Junior division.



Here is what the Junior soccer tables look like. The playing field is smaller, so the kids in the competition can build smaller and less sophisticated robots than the ones in the humanoid competition (shown above).



Then we ate lunch together, we had something called Biryani which was essentially curried rice, chicken and vegetables. It was wayyyy spicier than the guys told me that it would be, but it was good.



And apparently I was supposed to just dig into it with my hands, but I just decided to stick with the fork and spoon. The other volunteers just laughed at me and dug in, this is the guy that they called the vacuum cleaner for how much he ate.



There was some kind of traditional Malaysian music performance during opening ceremonies, which was cool.



And tons of Europeans at the competition were sporting those awkward length pants that are really capris, also known as "man-pris". I also saw quite a few guys wearing terrible jorts (jean shorts) that were the awkward capris length, but unfortunately was only able to capture this guy in the man-pris.

The Prima Revolving Restaurant over Singapore's Harbor

Today, our professors took us to a revolving restaurant overlooking the shipyard and harbor of Singapore. The Port of Singapore is apparently the largest transhipment point in the world, connecting the east and the west by sea. It was really interesting to see real-life port operations, especially after simulating the ports along the coast of East Africa for my Senior Design project. Though I'm fairly certain that the Singapore port operates much more efficiently than Mombasa, Djibouti or Dar es Salaam :) And it definitely has more berths, just look at all those cranes down the side of the port!



The restaurant was only on the 9th floor, but it was definitely high enough to provide a great view of the Port and of some of downtown Singapore. Professor Chen Zhou warned us that it would look like a warehouse from the outside. In this picture, you can barely see the little round part on top of the building, thats where we were!



On the way in, some of our group posed with the cut-out of the famous chef in the lobby. One of the local NUS students remarked that Bill (in the yellow shirt) sort of resembled the chef.



Then, the guys tried to pack the elevator over its full capacity, or should I say FCL? Can you tell we're all Industrial Engineers?



It turned out to be a really fancy restaurant... they served all 30+ of us a 6 course meal with Peking duck! Here is the girls table(plus Chris and Adi): we're still at LTL because we were waiting on a lady from DHL to join us.



This is me, Doris and Michelle! Doris is our friend who actually attends NUS, she is from China and super sweet. She was our tour guide around campus the first day and just finished up her supply chain internship at Apple here in Singapore.



We started out the meal with shark fin soup. It was kind of strange, the shark fin was very stringy and the soup had a thick consistency like egg drop soup.



The place setting on the table was a bit interesting, your tea cup sits on the left instead of your right. So much for learning the "b and d" technique with your hands in Total Person.



After the soup, we had a dish with 2 tiliapias. Annie loved the fish heads.



Next was a shrimp dish (they were the biggest shrimp that Annie had ever seen).



Our next course was the Peking duck wraps. I think these are like the tacos of the Chinese culture, with duck skin, meat, and a green onion inside a rice flour wrap covered in real duck sauce. Duck sauce should not be that orangey sweet and sour sauce that people always ask for at Rusans.



We also had some vegetables with scallops and a noodle dish. I think the noodle dish had duck meat in it as well.



For dessert, we had fruit (of course)and some sort of fried pancake with red bean paste inside. We always have fruit after the meal at home, I suppose this is one aspect of the asian culture that I am already used to!



During the course of the meal, Joe came over to show off his newly acquired skills of pouring tea without touching the hot teapot.



Seeing the port from above was really cool, especially since you get a much better sense of how big their operations actually are. Just look at the size of these yellow cranes, and how the white offices on top of them look so small. Those offices probably have the standard 10 ft tall ceiling.



Each container vessel will dock at a berth and wait to be unloaded and reloaded by these cranes. The vessel will be loaded with cargo depending on its final destination or next transhipment point, so that it will carry a full container load. After being loaded with cargo, the vessel will u-turn (assisted by tugboats) and head back out of the port. There are not really any warehouses in the port, except these few warehouses that break-bulk the containers for more optimal loading. These are probably the most aesthetic warehouses that I've ever seen (the blue buildings with glass windows and roofs).



There are a ridiculous number of containers at the port. Talk about an absolutely ridiculous queue.



The contemporary white building on the right is the Vivo Mall, the crazy 4 floor shopping mall that we went to our 1st day in Singapore! It doesn't look that tall in this photo but I think there are some basement floors. And the island on the left is Sentosa Island, where we took our first field trip.

The East Coast of Singapore

This weekend, NUS was doing maintenance work on our dorms so they shut off the power, water and internet all day on Saturday. So most of the people from my study abroad group went to the beach in Indonesia this weekend, on a ferry. A few of us stayed in town and spent all day yesterday on the East Coast of Singapore. Singapore is an island and Changi, the major airport (SIN) is located on the East Coast. Singapore also has a large harbor since it acts as one of the main trading ports between the East and the West.



There is a beach that runs all the way around the east coast with imported sand and really dirty water. I don't understand why the water is so dirty here, its just filled with a lot of trash and random floating debris. I think Singapore should invest in some kind of environmental cleanup operations, where they just install more trash cans along the beach or something. The fine for littering in Singapore is something ridiculous like $5000 but obviously its not that harshly enforced along the little east coast beach.



I can't believe we swam in this water. Actually I can, because it was so hot and humid outside. But random pieces of trash like cigarette cartons, food wrappers, bottles, etc kept running into me and it was disgusting.



Holly and I had fun on the beach :) we both got really burned though, because we were out there for a few hours and definitely did not reapply sunscreen.



And we built a sweet sand castle guy, recycling some of the leaves and trash that was in the water.



We rented bikes from a place in the park, it cost $6 for 2 hours with the bike. There was a bike path going along the coast for like 10km or something like that. We spent all 2 hours on the bikes and probably rode like 5 miles or so.



I got a sweet bike bell on mine :)



They have a dedicated bike path, we had to remember to bike on the left.. and the walking path is completely separate (on the right of this picture) so you don't get run over by bikes.



Of course we had to get a jump photo on the coastline. This is the 2nd photo of like 4 because the local guy who was taking the picture wasn't very experienced with capturing jump pictures.



We ate some more of the actual ice cream sandwiches... with a slice of sweet green and pink bread and a block of ice cream inbetween :)



Then we biked more down the coast and down a canal. And yes, the water was equally as dirty in the canal.







We also tried the famous East Coast chili crab at Jumbo! Well, I didn't really because I don't like spicy foods, but Holly and Chris did.



Okay, now my post is updated!

Yo Quiero Taco Bell

Yesterday, someone from our study abroad group was really craving Taco Bell, so he looked it up on Google Maps and emailed the whole group about it. We met downstairs and took a bus to Harbor Front, then took the MRT train to Clarke Quay, then walked to the Funan DigitaLife Center.

According to this link on Google Maps, it was somewhere within the 6 story mall, but we couldn't find it on any of the floors or in the surrounding area. And every single person that we asked had absolutely no idea what we were talking about. We spent about 2 hours traveling to this shopping center and searching for the Taco Bell without any luck... epic fail.

We ended up eating at a small sushi place instead, that had pretty boring and basic traditional Japanese rolls only. I really miss Rusans, I can't wait to get back and go there one last time to celebrate my birthday AND graduation :)

So today, I did a little researching on Taco Bell and found this on Answers.com:

"Taco Bell in Singapore existed for a number of years, mostly as combination stores with KFC such as the one that operated at the Funan Digital Life Mall, but in 2008 they completely pulled out of Singapore."

Moral of the story: Google Maps is NOT always right! (At least its still better than Mapquest and Yahoo though.)

A Weekend in Malaysia

A big group of 18 people from my study abroad program took a 6-hour bus ride to Kuala Lumpur this past weekend. The bus ride was alright, we had huge comfy seats that reclined almost all the way. Holly and I brought our blankets to sleep on the bus.



I had never been to Malaysia before, so it was pretty cool. The weirdest thing about Malaysia was seeing all the street signs in Malay, but with English characters so all the words just looked long and completely unpronounceable with too many vowels. We got into Malaysia at like 2am, dropped our stuff off at our hostel and then immediately walked to the Patronas Towers to begin lining up for the famous sky bridge on the 41st floor.



After waiting in line for hours until the ticket office opened at 8:30am, I was pretty grouchy since I hadn't slept like at all. But the view from the sky bridge was awesome, and reminded me of the skyline back in Atlanta.





There was a big group of asian tourists taking a jumping picture, so our guys decided that they needed a jumping picture too.



And us girls tried to take a picture leaning over the railing but it didn't work out too well.



After the Patronas Towers, we took the train to check out the Central Market and Chinatown area. We stopped and ate at some indian place on the river, I had no idea what any of the food was and our server hardly spoke english. So I just told him that I didn't want anything that was spicy or had curry in it, and ended up with some kind of pancake with chicken and onions mixed in. And a curry dipping sauce. The water in the river was disgusting too, I am glad that I did the typhoid vaccine even though the water seems to be safe to drink in Singapore.



Then we went to Chinatown, where I felt right at home (don't laugh) and had fun bargaining with all the street vendors for knockoff brand name stuff. I got a sweet teal Longcchamp bag for $25 ringgits, which is about the equivalent of $7 us dollars. And it matches my teal shirt!



I also got a blue Chelsea soccer jersey and a teal Lacoste v-neck shirt for $20 ringgits each. Jason and Chris got super intense Transformer belts.



After Chinatown, we went to the Butterfly Garden. There were so many butterflies flying around everywhere, they landed on both Holly and Christine and one landed on my head (but no one was quick enough to get a picture of it).









On Sunday, we went to the Batu Caves. The Batu Caves are Hindu shrines built into a huge cave. This gate is where our taxi dropped us off.



There are 272 concrete steps to the top, and a 130 ft statue of a deity. The steps are very small and steep, I was barely able to fit my size 6 foot onto one of the steps.



Inside, the caves contain some different shrines.







They also hold prayers inside what looks like a temple inside the caves.



Coming down from the caves was a little bit scary since it was so steep, I was worried that I would misplace my foot and just tumble down the stairs.





Someone told us that there would be monkeys running around everywhere inside the caves, which kind of scared me because I declined to get the rabies vaccine shot, but we only saw 1 monkey and he was really busy digging through the trash.



A few people decided to re-hydrate with coconuts after climbing up and down all those steps to the caves.



And then we ate more Indian food near the caves.



So we had a really busy weekend touring around KL, but eventually we made it home to Singapore on Sunday night... just in time to cram for our 2nd quiz on Chinese history! Our professor is now going to cover modern Japanese history in just 3 days and then our final for the history class is 2 essays, due Thursday!