Hanging out in Urumqi

I like this place.  We only just arrived yesterday evening, and we haven't seen much of the city at all, but it seems like a really interesting place so far.  I keep hearing about the "minority people" who live here, but it's sort of like walking around Dorchester or Harlem and calling folks there "minorities" - it's all relative.  There are apparently 26 non-Han Chinese groups in XinJiang, and it does look like more of a smorgasbord of people.  I'm starting to pick out some of the different types.  At least the Uyghurs, Khasaks, and Russians don't seem too hard to spot.  The Uyghur men have mustaches.  Once in awhile I think I see a Westerner, but I think those are the Russians.  The language diversity is cool.  The signs are all in Chinese and Arabic with a bit of Cyrillic here and there.  Not much English though. And I've liked the food quite a lot, but I seem to like the food just about anywhere :)

We've spent the day so far at XinJiang University with our colleagues planning for the field trip.  This seems like it's going to work out quite well.  We'll be traveling with an older retired professor who is an expert in rodent biology.  He apparently knows the rural areas enough to help us find the right sites and get us set up at a field research station.  Our supplies are scheduled to arrive from Beijing tomorrow, so we should be able to get solutions made and be on the road in the next couple of days.  I'm itching to get busy.  We've been in China a week already, and it just seems that everything happens so slowly.  Meanwhile, I'm helping to edit the English grammar for a PhD student here who is about to submit a paper to a journal and helping some of their young masters students to practice their conversational English.  I am supposed to be giving a talk tomorrow on our research, but I'm not sure how much folks will understand.  At least a lot can be conveyed visually.  Still, it's been a lot of fun, and everyone is very kind and enthusiastic.

 This is an incredibly well-equipped lab, too.  The Dean of Life Sciences essentially has an empire of about 80 people - several professors and a ton of PhD and masters students.  And they seem to have every bit of equipment you could ever ask for.  Some of it is a bit outdated and dusty, but it all seems to be well maintained and well used.  They're very interested in what we're doing which is nice and quite different from the folks we worked with last year.  

Alright, that's it for now.  Hopefully more later when I'm not so distracted by this obnoxiously slow internet connection.  I'm trying to get the Harvard library server loaded so that I can retrieve a few references I need, and it seems painfully slow. Ugh...