Gong Cheng's Blog

Last weekend, we visited Vancouver, BC, the closest foreign city from Seattle. There are 2 motives besides the easy access. One is the food, Vancouver has very big Chinese population, it is a very good place to taste Chinese food if you care. The other reason is to enjoy the city fun, including the aquarium and the world famous suspension bridge.

 

The first restaurant we visited was Jing Fu(for dim sum), a restaurant with over professional service. All the waiter/waitress wear ear plug, which gives you the feeling that your are eating in a restaurant operated by FBI. The price in this restaurant is also reasonable with 2.5 CND/dim sum.

 

The second restaurant we visited was Xiang Cai Wang (in English should be the King of dishese from Hunan Province). We went to this restaurant because we got recommendations from Sandra. The food in this restaurant is much more spicy than other food in that area. Although the decoration is very low key, the price is not low comparing with similar restaurant. We asked the owner to put less spicy into the food.

 

The third restaurant we visited was Grand Honour Restaurant. This Chinese name of that restaurant let me suspect that restaurant is a member of a world famous Chinese restaurant chain – Ah Yat Abalone. Anyway, that is a pricy restaurant focusing on abalone, shark fin. Each dinner could easily cost 100$/person. In tradition, abalone and shark fin are considered to be nutritious. Most guests of this restaurant speak cantoness. The dim sum are very well made.

 

The last restaurant is a shanghai style restaurant located in the Richmond town center, we didn’t reserve place ahead. When we arrived, we had to wait 10 minutes in order to get in. One cool thing in that restaurant is that the waitress there can speak multiple Chinese dialogues, including mandarin, cantoness and shanghainess. The decoration of the restaurant is very homey, all the menus are written in Chinese.  The dishes are cooked in very decent Shanghai style. 

 

We spend the first afternoon at the Vancouver aquarium, next morning at suspension bridge, after that, we visisted Steveston village.

 

Vancouver aquarium has many interesting shows including white whale, shark, dolphine, sea otters, sea lion, etc. They are very well trained to response to certain poses of the trainer. Connecting a series of trainer’s poses by the trainers, the animalswill response with a series actions. Awarding the animals with food after each action, the trainer could make an interesting show with some story behind it.Those shows are fun to watch. The large collection of the fishes and the related water-born creatures remind me the diversity of the ocean lives.

 

Our next visit was the suspension bridge. The suspension bridge is hanging around above a river with water fall views. Standing on the bridge, I can see the river flushing underneath it. It was raining, so we just took a quick trail and get on the car.

 

Our last stop was the Steveston Village located at the south of the Richmond, BC. This is a very beautiful village with large water front view.  The village is a historical fishery terminal, the whole village has only about 10 blocks. The west side of the village is converted to garry point park right now. 

 

 

To cure PGESD(Post General Exam Syndrom Disorder), I spent the weekend playing a online flash game Raiden X, eventually, I am capable of go through all 8 stages without cheating. Raiden X is a classical aircraft shooting game. The player starts with a small simple aircraft on the buttom of the screen, using rifle to shoot enomous amout of enemy targets including aircraft, tank, etc. During the battle, the player had chance to upgrade the weapon and gaining extra bomb and lives. At the end of each stage, there will be a giganic enemy machine waiting for you with more than plenty bullets. After finishing each stage, you will get extra bonus for doing a good job. These games were even more popular at later 80’s or early 90’s, before the advanced home video games and internet games. But in terms of game design, the satification to human nature, those old games are still classical art works for that techniques. If you are interested in computer game, I highly recommend you to try it for a whle. If you die in the game, the program will pop up  a message – "By suffering comes wisdom", I like it a lot!

Christmas is coming, I am wondering what to do during the holidays? My last 3 Christmas was spent in the lab, but this year I want to try something new. I missed the last day to get a signature from the ISO, so I may not be able to go to Vancouver, BC, but I had been there anyway. Maybe Portland, Oregan?

I like them because they got me escaped from what I am really serious about a little bit. That is a good thing.

I went to bookstore today to browse books about English writing. It seems American teachers teach writing in a very similar way that Chinese teachers teach Chinese writing. The first is to learn how to make sentences. Just like Chinese, English sentences have several typical structures. A lot of sentence making exercises are necessary to learn to produce plain English sentences freely. Following the work of the sentence making, study on paragraph structure and organization is the main focus. It took us 12 years to learn to read and write Chinese in a decent way. We probably need comparable amount of work to learn to write in decent English. For us, writing in a concise and analytical way is a very important skill we should gain in graduate school  if we have got that.

While working on my slides, I always think about are there a medicine that we could take so that we never feel tired about doing boring things? Is there such a drug, or is it possible to make such a drug? Alternatively, we hope there are other drugs such as drugs can improve cardiovascular health without working out, drugs can keep people concious and healthy without sleeping. Drugs can relief stress without significant side effects. That will be cool… 

Is nothing more than a bunch of very small things. Every single step is achieveable by any people, but just like everything else, to get all of them done on time is something significant. It is not hard to make one brick, it is also not hard to put one brick on top of the other, but making great wall is impossible without a lot of people’s hard work.