This week started with a nice dinner for Canada Day in the Olympic Village. Most is still under construction but we got a glimpse of the large infrastructure being built. Heard of the bird's nest? Its the Olympic Coliseum - original architecture - that resembles a bird's nest.
Earlier in the day we were in a street called LiuLi Chang, a very artistic area with calligraphy stores. We got a scroll with a chinese poem about the moon done for us right there. The well-known poem says the moon brings people together (how appropriate :).
This week's expert panel was with 5 astronauts from different agencies. China's first taikonaut, Yang Liwei was there, so the media was quite interested in the event. My question to the panel was on keeping the backlog of astronauts employed and motivated in NASA and the future of governmental human space flight programs. The future isnt really booming in this area: the space shuttle will be retired in 2010 and the space station still only employs 3 out of a possible 6 slots.
The courses this week helped me brush up on satellite communication bandwidth budgeting and there was a really interesting lecture from Jeff Hoffman on the space environment on human beings.
Today (Saturday) was the tour of Tianenmen Square, Forbidden City, a pearl factory, and Temple of Heaven. It was about 36C and humid. I'd like to see the Forbidden City in early spring, perhaps with a bit of snow on the ground. We suffered through the heat and visited the Starbucks within the Forbidden City (as one student put it "they should rename the Starbucks the Temple of Heaven" as she sipped a frappuccino).
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