Down in the Underground

With the conclusion of the formal ACFS trip, our party of thirteen ventured in their own directions from Chengdu. For me, it was an early morning trip to Wuxi, which I'll do by train in the future. Wuxi is a city I have been to four times now, and I chose a modest local hotel where people spoke less English than I speak Chinese, and that's saying something. I was a 30-minute walk to the Tai Lake (the more common anglophone name, "Taihu Lake", translates as "Great Lake Lake"). The designated scenic and ecological area is quite beautiful and large enough to spend several days exploring. By chance, I had arrived for a weekend of the Cherry Blossom Festival (not just a Japanese thing), and the parklands were alive with visitors and entertainment. The real purpose of my visit to this city, however, came on the Monday when I was given the opportunity to visit the National Supercomputing Centre and the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which held the world's no 1 position for an unprecedented two years in succession. This was a bit of a personal dream come true for me and, as a result, I have written a few notes about it on my main website along with some earlier comments about the Guizhou data centre and radio telescope.

From Wuxi, I took a high-speed train to Shanghai, which peaked at 298km/h. Arriving at Shanghai, I had a leisurely morning with Melbourne people, Nadia and Michael, visiting the Buddhist Jing'an Temple before going our separate ways. I moved into my small (one room) refurbished apartment in a block inhabited since the 1920s, inhabited almost exclusively by older locals. The following day I met with the local Friendship Association who took me on a tour of the Shanghai library, a gleaming seven-story building that is mostly library, part museum, and part community centre. The building is so designed that it appears to float over water and overlooks extensive parkland. After that, I was taken on a visit to the Shanghai Art and Design Academy (SADA), which included various media workshops and a museum-like showcase of the best examples from former students. That evening, I went on a lengthy walk along The Bund with its famous colonial buildings (the imperialists left something worthwhile), and then spent much of the following day at the extensive History Museum, before heading to the airport for the overnight flight back to Australia.

Thus ends my fifth trip to China in the last 2.5 years. If one has the means, I certainly recommend a visit to culture, history, and the environment. At each visit, I become increasingly confident in my own capacity to get around independently, and I am absolutely delighted at how organised and efficient the Chinese intercity fast-train system is, but also their various intracity metro systems that are all clean, quiet, safe, frequent, extensive, and inexpensive, making them absolutely the preferred way to travel. In the long run, I hope to arrange a cultural exchange between the Shanghai Municipality and Victoria based on UNESCO-level cultural cities, as well as an operatic exchange between Sichuan and Victoria. However, it's early days on both of these projects. In the meantime, it's time for a brief repose from international journeys.