Hi, My Dear Friends! After a month hard life here, I almost settled down at last. Now it's time to send greeting to my dear friends and share my interesting experience here with all of you. I started my trip on a rather lucky date, Aug. 8 (8/8). After flying for more than twenty hours, I arrived Pittsburgh, a mountain city. The Christian organization here picked me up at airport and arranged the temporary housing. Unlike other universities, Carnegie Mellon University has no dormitory for graduate students and even not enough for undergraduate either. This makes housing the biggest problem for new coming students. We have to find an apartment in a rather short period, otherwise everything will become harder after the semester begin. This task is even hard for our Chinese students, because we want an apartment with both quality and low rent. The house hunting is like this. The landlord put a sign on the front door of those vacant rooms, on which "Apartment for Rent" or "For Rent" is written. There is also landlord's telephone number on those signs. You process your hunting by go to a section of the city, where you intend to live, walk along the streets, write down those telephone number, find a telephone, call those landlord to arrange an appointment to see each one's apartment, go to those places to investigate each apartment on the arranged dates, and at last make your choice. In more than a week, I had WALKED along almost every streets in every section within 1.5 mile to CMU to hunt my dreaming house (it made me so familiar with the streets here :-b). This was really a hard work! Maybe I have walked from Beijing to Tianjing in those days. :) But anyway, I have found a rather good apartment at last. After the energy consuming house hunting began the time consuming orientation. We got a full filled schedule with lectures, introductions, tutorials. We also have to find out time to do many kind of registrars during the orientation. The offices' efficiency is no better than Tsinghua. :) You can find many similar things to Tsinghua here, although the basic equipment here is much better. The large university computer rooms (called Cluster) here play the same role as open lab in Tsinghua, but students need not to pay for using them and especially it's FREE to surf the internet. :) There are many sports equipment here for free using. It is interesting that they are all put adjacent to dining rooms with just glass walls. For example, sitting in the dining room when eating your food, you can watch the swimmers swimming in a glass room just on your side. This makes me remind that in restaurant they will put a big glass box of fresh fish at the side of the dining room. :) Since Pittsburgh is a moutain city like ChongQin in China, the buildings here show the same properties. E.g. the main door of CS building opens at the fifth floor, and it leads to the first floor of another building. The weather of Pittsburgh is not as good as ChongQin. It is said that it snows for almost half year here. I saw a picture with a car totally buried in snow. Now it's hot in daytime and very cold after midnight. I have bought a bike to go to school. Many american students go to school by wheel skate, and I have even seen a student riding one wheel bike. It's United State. :-) Soon the semester began before the orientation ended, while I have not settled down my new apartment yet. The life seems always beginning with hard. :( Now I have almost settled down, the following is my address information: Home address: JianBing Li 5728 Baum Blvd. Apt. 3R Pittsburgh, PA 15206 USA E-mail: jianbing@andrew.cmu.edu, jbli+@cs.cmu.edu Phone: (412)361-6622(home) (412)268-8100(office) Office: Doherty Hall 4302 I am looking forward to hearing from all of you !!! Yours, Li, JianBing -- Li, JianBing E-Mail: jianbing@andrew.cmu.edu Office: Doherty Hall 4302 Phone: (412)268-8100(office) (412)361-6622(home)