Cost/ The cost per student of participating in the travel portion of the 2009 BE Lab is approximately between $4,500 and $5,000, based on the following expenses:
Tentative Itinerary/
Accommodations/ Accommodations in Chengdu and Taoping will be arranged by partner faculty at Sichuan University. It is expected that accommodations in Taoping will be in the form of homestays with villagers. Stay tuned for more details regarding the personal effects you should prepare to bring.... Transportation/ Since many students may combine their participation in the BE Lab with other travel plans, students are responsible for arranging their own international travel. Students are of course welcome to coordinate plans, and some faculty and doctoral student assistants may arrange group travel from one of the more popular international airports in China (e.g. Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong) to Chengdu. Transportation within Sichuan and between Sichuan and Yunnan will be arranged by the BE Lab faculty. (More details coming....) Travel Documents/ Your passport must be valid for the entire period you expect to be outside the US, plus an extra six months beyond that. If you don't have a passport already, apply for one NOW through the U.S. passport office. It can take up to 2 months for a passport to be processed so do not wait until the last minute. For non-U.S. citizens, valid passports are also required. You can visit this handy and informative visa service website to study the requirements, options and costs of applying for a China visa. Students will be responsible for their own consular fee, but the BE Lab class will apply as a group to save on service fees and shipping. Climate/ Summer is hot, hazy and humid in Chengdu, which lies in an inland basin. In late June and early July, temperatures range on average from 21°C (70°F) at night to 29°C (88°F) during the day. Lijiang, Taoping and Jiuzhaigou are at higher elevations and are considerably cooler at night. Jiuzhaigou, at 3000 feet, is the highest, and average low temperatures in July are 9°C (50°F). Skies are very clear at these elevations, and protection against the sun is necessary. Languages/ The people with whom the BE Lab will work speak Mandarin, Sichuanese, and Qiang. Knowledge of these languages will be helpful but not required for taking the BE Lab. Even if you do not know these languages, it would help a great deal even just to learn the basic rules of the standard romanization system used in the People's Republic (hanyu pinyin), since most street signs and maps use it along with Chinese characters, and to learn how to count and identify essential words (e.g. "cesuo" is "toilet"). Ideally, you could enroll in a basic Mandarin Chinese class during the Spring Quarter, if not at UW, then at another local college. In the absence of speaking or writing knowledge of these languages, an ability to communicate graphically will also be useful. The Spring Quarter preparatory seminar will include exercises in visual-environmental literacy and non-verbal communication. Cultures/ A central topic of the 2009 BE Lab is how to account for cultural difference in the course of planning for sustainable disaster recovery and hazard mitigation. The majority of China's population belongs to the Han ethnic group. The mountains of western Sichuan, however, including most of the area affected by the earthquake of May 2008, are home to a great variety of minority ethnic groups, including especially Tibetan and Qiang groups. The BE Lab project site, Taoping village, is a classic Qiang ethnic settlement. The majority of Qiang people live within the earthquake zone -- to the extent that their very survival as a culture is in jeopardy. The Spring Quarter BE Lab preparatory seminar will provide the students with an orientation to China's ethnic policies and the developmental challenges facing the Qiang. More information about Taoping, the Min River watershed, and the context, goals and methods of the BE Lab studio is also available elsewhere on the BE Lab website. Communication/ Students can stay in touch with family and friends in the U.S. via the Internet and international phone cards. The faculty will investigate the possibility of providing satellite cards for laptops to connect to the Internet while in Taoping. U.S. cell phones cannot be used in China, unless they are equipped with global roaming service. Please refer to the UW International Programs and Exchanges website for more general UW travel and study abroad information. For even more general information on China travel, including U.S. consular contact information, see the U.S. Department of State. |