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Sev­eral days ago I attended a small "Work­shop on Quan­tum Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence" at the Uni­ver­sity of HongKong. It was a very nice expe­ri­ence. In fact, that was my sec­ond time giv­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion in my home coun­try. The work­shop ended up with being fruit­ful. In par­tic­u­lar, in the so-called brain­storm­ing ses­sion of the work­shop, whose goal was to stim­u­late col­lab­o­ra­tions, I had an excit­ing dis­cus­sion with some math­e­mati­cians. There, I also ran into a bit dif­fi­culty in com­mu­ni­cat­ing with pure math­e­mati­cians, who had lit­tle back­ground in Gen­eral Rel­a­tiv­ity. Math­e­mati­cians and physi­cists do have dif­fer­ent ways of think­ing in gen­eral; how­ever, it was actu­ally my prob­lem most of the time because I had almost never talked to pure math­e­mati­cians before and was always uncon­sciously assum­ing my audi­ence rel­a­tivists in the early stage of the dis­cus­sion. For­tu­nately, things went on pretty smooth as the dis­cus­sion went as deep as that all phys­i­cal prob­lems boiled down to math­e­mat­i­cal ones. Truly, I learned a lot in the work­shop.

The Uni­ver­sity of Hongkong is built on, in fact from the bot­tom to the mid­dle of, a moun­tain, the Vic­to­ria Peak. It thus has a unique, quite mag­nif­i­cent, and very tricky cam­pus: a "3-dimensional" one, dif­fer­ent from a usual 2-dimensional cam­pus. The def­i­n­i­tion of ground level loses its unam­bi­gu­ity here, although each build­ing is still assigned a ground level man­u­ally. The tricky part is, if you used a 2D map of this place, you could eas­ily get lost. I should also men­tion that to get from the sea level to a build­ing on cam­pus is really a good phys­i­cal exer­cise, despite long esca­la­tors are avail­able for a part of the way.

I like HongKong so much, as always, since the first time I vis­ited it, which was almost two decades ago. It is an exquis­ite south­ern city of China, located per­fectly in the sense of Feng­Shui: neigh­bor­ing a moun­tain and sur­rounded by water. Indeed crowded HongKong is, but one can still find tran­quil­ity and rest­ful­ness here and there, on its tor­tu­ous moun­tain roads, or under the umbrella of its huge, ever­green banyans grow­ing every­where. This time, as soon as I stepped out of the HongKong air­port, I smelled in the air the scent that I am famil­iar with, a lit­tle bit but appro­pri­ately sticky, which is just iden­ti­cal to that in Guangzhou, my sec­ond home­town. This is suf­fi­cient to make me feel home, not to men­tion that I can speak Can­tonese here. The con­se­quence is, although it was almost 12am after I checked in in my hotel, given that I had a talk to give in the morn­ing, I couldn't help from wan­der­ing around to look for a decent tea restau­rant where I could eat some authen­tic Can­tonese Dim Sum that I missed so much.

The night view of HongKong is par­tic­u­larly charm­ing; it is in fact the best one in the world. To my point of view, it is the night of a mod­ern city, filled with con­crete and steel, that makes the city alive and truly a human world. The incan­des­cent and flu­o­res­cent lights glow­ing through thou­sands of win­dows and the criss­cross weaved by the traces of car lights in a city com­pose the warmest pic­ture of the city. Were archi­tec­tures of a city a frozen piece of music, it should be the night of the city that melts the frozen piece and makes it flow. 

Unfor­tu­nately, I didn't have a chance this time to go to Tsim Sha Tsui or the top of Vic­to­ria Peak, where one can take bet­ter pic­tures of the night view of HongKong. I still man­aged to take sev­eral pic­tures, some of which were taken from the roof of my hotel after hav­ing had a win­ter swim in the pool on the roof.

A down­side fac­tor that con­tributes to the splen­did night view of Hongkong is the com­bi­na­tion of lim­ited land resources and a large, yet grow­ing pop­u­la­tion, which leaves the city no options but con­struct­ing build­ings up to the sky. In Hongkong, espe­cially at night, you may often be shocked by really high rise apart­ment build­ings, built on a hill­side, that loom up right to your face all of a sud­den after you make a turn at a street cor­ner. I think, one can hardly under­stand why we Chi­nese call peo­ple liv­ing in mod­ern metrop­o­lises "cage man" until one stands right here, in Hongkong.

Please enjoy the photo slideshow in below, which may visu­al­ize what I wrote above.

Another great prod­uct from Cin­copa Send Large Files. Also read about Cin­copa word­press plu­g­ins for your website.

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