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blog, Gruss made in Macao! pjs Sent on 17/10/2006

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China 2006 - BJ->HK, Sanitization, Wrong-Sides, Chicken Claw

Second part of the journey begins today... going to HK. Early morning taxi ride to the airport. (Flagging down a taxi at the street proves easy&cheaper than a hotel-provided one.)

Lift panel at the HK airport gets "sanitized every two hours".
Observation: Small people, large cell phones. It's steaming hot once I step out of the airport building in search of the bus, actually even in the small gap between the airplane and the airport gangway.

Squid-scallop-shrimp-bbq-bun at HKAI Maxim's.

Slightly startling observation: Buses run at the wrong side of the street.

In the evening: Taxi has no pedals and no wheel at front left! And, HK cab drivers are not caged in like the BJ ones.
I ate 1/2 chicken foot during dinner, hopefully proving myself at least a brave gwailo. Supermassive tofu ice cream afterwards.

HK skyline definitely has changed from ten years ago. The landmarks of that time are but mere bystanders in today's highrise park in Central.

[To be continued...]

China 2006 - Mutianyu, Summer Palace, KongYiJi Restaurant

6 RMB p.p. for bus to Huairou on the way to the Great Wall at Mutianyu, with my feet sticking out into aisle. The taxi driver honks away pedestrians who got dropped off earlier from their buses on the way to the parking lot right next to the Mutianyu Great Wall... like VIPs. It's a local taxi, meaning private, but as there are no official ones in smaller cities, it's no scam. We visit a faraway section of the Wall, with much fewer people than at Badaling ten years ago. Chinese gondola ride uphill to the Wall itself, German Sommerrodelbahn down.

Observation: Chinese spit even while talking at the mobile phone.

Almost got locked in at the dark SummerPalace at night.

Taxi to Chinese restaurant Kong3Yi3Ji3 with traditional top-down menu, story of fraudulent book-borrowing ancient scholar, and traditional courtyard layout&lighting. Some tea-cooked shrimp, crabs, and good tea.
Tripped somebody at the washroom sink over my feet.

China 2006 - Yuanmingyuan, Tsinghua&Body Count

Several good presentations in the morning.

Lost&mosquito-bitten in the Yuanmingyuan (old Summer Palace ruins) in the late afternoon; I'm the only Westerner there. Some stray dogs are following me at a distance, while I am looking for loose stones to scare them away.





Dinner at a Tsinghua/Qinghua restaurant after a late evening walk through the on-campus residential area. Body count; around 500 animals on the table, including one duck and one donkey, 350 get eaten whole. The order is taken on a WLAN-enabled Handspring. Cheers waft over from the next room... as the other tables are discussing quantum physics, they probably cheer for some successful cold fusion at their table. Some of the food stays where it belongs because it's bogged down by some working class grade booze of 56 vol%.

China 2006 - Presentations, GHoP, non-English taxi

Woke up for a day with two talks of mine with only one properly set alarm clock.

Organization running out of coffee, plates, cutlery, &glasses repeatedly.

No questions after Surgical Robotics presentation, two from chair of Path Planning session. Is the IROS not a good place for Robot-Assisted Surgery?
Momentous revelation to be remembered: Self-contained presentations are the best.

Conference Center parking lot full of buses at 17:00; gathering for Conference Banquet at the Great Hall of The People.
At first, my name's not on the GHoP-dinner bus security check list, but shows up later. A real VIP treatment: Police escort for our 17+ buses, crossing red lights in a convoy - true invitees of the GHoP. Having such an array of large vehicles allows for some very effective traffic shaping - closing off a street crossing to free it for the remaining buses is feasible.
There are 2.6 million cars in BJ currently. Plans include increasing the number of subway lines from two to ten until the Olympics in 2008.

The GHoP building is so large it doesn't change shape when one moves in front of it. First class dinner, BJ opera&music presentation.

The way back takes 15 minutes, while getting there was a bus ride of 1.5 hours due to rush hour jams.

Lone taxi back to my hotel with a non-English-speaking driver who obviously is not a BJ local and not only has no idea where to go, but also refuses to follow several clear instructions. Successful in the end thanks to a bilingual city map and a compass.

China 2006 - Planning, Observations, Social Gap

Grabbed a 1st-come-1st-serve lunch. Plenary talk abt co-existence with robots rather useless.
Most talks so far uninteresting.

Therefore, the interesting questions: When to visit the Great Wall? Or Tian Tan?

Observation: Simple papers/presentations draw many questions, but probably it's because either they're self-contained or those papers claim (novel) speedups for solutions of known problems.
English's a torture in general.

Long taxi ride in evening rush hour. Dinner at Danielli's; proving that pizza can only be ordered in a pizzeria, definitely not in a 5-Star ristorante.

China 2006 - 30%, IROS, Pizza Hut, Reception

Taxi transfer to conference site.
Some confusion over banquet tickets.
I'm trying to get over the remaining jetlag with an iced latte mocha at the very style-generic Crowne Plaza next door. Like everything in China, the 5-star hotel's waterfountain is 30% too loud.



About 1080666006 people in a Chinese supermarket.
Pizza Hut offers "Casual Dinning" (sic), with the single courses being timed and logged, maybe for quality assurance reasons. One waiter per two or three tables (as everywhere in China) creates a feeling of constant supervision, mixed with an almost-forgotten sense of Colonial exploitation on my side. No tipping allowed, again.

Conference workshop extremely tiring.



Conference reception on lawn outside. Met Rui (an old acquaintance from Montpellier times, he wanted to rent&drive a car at BJ, hopefully I managed to talk him out of this), met the Japanese German-speaking acquaintance from IROS 2005, and met Zhang Hong (my "host" of the EDM Aug'06 RONAF invited talk, gossipped about weather), & some others.

China 2006 - BJ: Hutong, Forbidden City, Chinese Pepper

Breakfast at Bamboo Garden Hotel is bad, as staff is unhelpful and obviously not accustomed to the Western etiquette of their primary clientele (assumed to be laowai, as Chinese probably don't settle for traditional hotels for this price).

Now I have to talk Chinese on my own. Nin hao, xiexie, bu yong, zaijian!

Mounting Bell Tower in the hutong right across the street. Lower floor occupied by a laowei cha establishment, full of tourists watching a theatrically spiced-up tea ceremony.
Mahjongg tables along the Beihai shore walk.



Long footwalk to Tiananmen, coughs&sneezes developing due to exhaust fumes along the way.
There are only old men at a streetside playground, obviously engaging in their morning Tai Ji Quan sessions.
Scene at a pedestrians crossing: Two waves of people facing each other and meeting in the middle of the street - one tourists, one hawkers with postcards.





The Forbidden City is under renovation, but features "4-Star toilets", I got caught for a picture with a little Chinese girl.






In the evening dinner at Fei Teng Yu Xiang Restaurant: Fresh fish ("the cook just mashed its head, right after I chose it"), tastebud-numbing Chinese pepper. Depressing information about social situation of waiters, but no tipping allowed.

China 2006 - BJ: Wangfujing

Going to business street Wangfujing, looking for deer penis for MW, but only receiving strange sideways glances by saleswomen. Settling on seahorses for CS instead.

"Xin Dong An Guangchang"? (Note to myself: What did I mean by this comment at the time?)
4got 5.&6.floor (Note: And this?)

Chinese Starbucks are lacking WLAN.

Got lost on way to Tibetan restaurant for dinner, needed repeated instructions from the same sanlunche tricyclist. Sour butter wine, spicyhot chicken, and Tibetan folk dancing groupe.

China 2006 - ...->HK->BJ

Crossing border into Chinese airspace - already first Chinese passenger cleaning his nose in a very loud manner.
HK airport. Japanese at restroom(!) bowing to yield/give right of way to me on the way out.
Yellow-clad Buddhist monk greeting. 3hrs until transfer.



Talking escalators. McDull says "Thank you for keeping the airpt clean."
Ferrari-label shop features German Schumi technorap.

Completely lost sense of place over Wonton Soup. Where am I? VCV, BJ, FFM, HK, MUC?
"I'll still have that, thank you.'' How should the local waiter have known what I meant without me pointing&waving? Or... is this still British HK? ...

30° C. Flight to BJ, seat at emergency exit. Air so misty the plane projects a shadow into the air itself, not onto clouds. Bumpy ride. Very quick good meal, served only upon descent.

During descent into BJ, whole city quarters are flickering in the dark. Foggy. Smoggy? 19° C. Taxi sent by hotel for pickup from the airport.

China 2006 - FFM->HK->...

Today I leave for China. Exactly speaking, I'm the LS AI III emissary to the IROS 2006 conference in Beijing.
Jetlag sets in even before leaving Bayreuth due to my colleague Stefan, who, being my driver to office, passes by my home in early morning.

Today the Deutsche Bahn rail company is on strike. After lenghty consideration of this fact, I ordered a taxi to the train station. The taxi driver parked in the GSP parking lot invisibly behind a garbage bin, so I got scolded all the way to the station by the driver for being three minutes late at his car. In addition, he extorted a one Euro tip by simply not returning change.

Day of DB strikes: the train is 20 minutes late before even arriving. So I had to take a second taxi back to home, then go to Frankfurt by means of Smørebrød. (I wonder if our secretary will be able to reclaim the DB ticket expense from the Rail&Fly combination offer...)

Met my family at the airport; left my car with them to avoid hundreds of Euro of parking fees. Lots of souvenir requests.



Security Check found an old bubblegum metal paper strip in my trousers' pocket that already merged into the fabric over the course of several laundries. In general it's much tighter security than two months ago on the way to Canada, before the GB liquid explosives affair.

Seat facing wall not too bad.
10h30 to go to Hong Kong, then 3h transit, then 3h30 to Beijing.
Food ok, but no medal of honour for Asian food for it. Some red wine to help sleep.

Little China Blog: The Crutch (06-10-2006)

Today I leave for IROS 2006 in Beijing, China.
However, the whole trip has to overcome obstacles even before taking off from Bayreuth, Germany - Die Bahn is on strike (strike-bound? strike-stricken?), and I won't catch my flight in Frankfurt on time if I don't take the car. Damn them labour unions.



(The Tagesschau headline "Ban einzig verbliebener Kandidat" sounds a bit... ironic in this light.)

IROS 2006

Dear Mr. Philipp J. Stolka:

Congratulations!
On behalf of the Program Committee of IROS 2006, we are very pleased to inform you the acceptance of your paper:

"Improving Navigation Precision of Milling Operations in Surgical Robotics"

for presentation at the conference and for inclusion in the conference DVD proceedings.

IROS 2006 received 2166 paper submissions from over 50 countries, which is a new record in IROS history. The Program Committee worked very hard to thoroughly review all the submitted papers, and your paper is one of the 1002 accepted papers, which represent a acceptance rate of about 46%.

[...]

Thank you again for your contribution to the IROS 2006. Please visit our conference website often for future updates. All of us on the Program Committee and the Organizing Committee are looking forward to seeing you in Beijing and your participation in a very successful IROS 2006!