In Hangzhou

I moved to Hangzhou on 4 September to do my master’s thesis at Zhejiang University.

I had been here before. Last year, moving around China, I passed through and liked it straight away. Coming back to live for a few months is a different thing.

The work is data-driven reduced-order models to predict urban air pollution, co-supervised by UPM and ZJU. Five months of research, here until January.

I chose Hangzhou for two reasons. One is Shanghai: an hour away by train, close to where I already was last year, to the contacts I made there and to Xiji Incubator. The other is the microclimate of companies. Hangzhou is the Chinese Silicon Valley: Alibaba, Unitree, Hikvision, NetEase, Geely, all of it here. And then, beyond all that, there is the other Hangzhou, the one of West Lake and the tea hills. There is a saying in Chinese, 上有天堂，下有苏杭, above there is heaven, below there are Suzhou and Hangzhou.