Things are finally turning around

I've learned something very important about Chinese people on this trip.  They're often *very* shy.  Painfully so sometimes.  If you've been reading along with my adventures (or lack thereof), you'll probably have noticed that I mentioned very few here, outside of my team, speak English.  That's actually not true.  Most of the students working here actually do speak English.  Several of them quite well.  It turns out they've been watching me and listening to me speak with my colleagues too scared to approach me themselves.  For two weeks.  Two solid weeks of wanting to say "hello" but being too afraid to get the word out.  One girl confessed that even once she decided she wanted to talk to me, it took her three days of actively trying to get up the nerve.  Her mother also works here at the field station and is the one who eventually forced her to come to my door.  They went to the market and brought me a beautiful selection of plums and apricots.  The first fruit I've had in weeks.  It was delightful and so nice of them.  So now I have new friends and get to sit at the "cool kids table" for meals when the rest of my team is out in the desert.  I don't have to be the leper anymore. Though there is still one girl who looks like she wants to faint or vomit every time she sees me.  I've heard she's the last hold out, so I'm waiting for her to build up the courage.  I just keep smiling when I see her so maybe she'll decided I won't bite ;)

We also have several other new friends that we met in town yesterday.  The guys and I walked into town for ice cream after our rodent fest, and while we were making our selections and paying, an older man walked up to me, stood there for awhile, and just stared.  It was a little awkward until Shaoyuan started talking to him.  He's an 80 year old Korean War vet, and it took me a while to realize that he was a vet on the *other* side of the war from the American vets.  He said he was outside the market when someone told him there was an American walking around, and he had to come see my "big nose" for himself. He'd heard that all Americans have big noses.  He determined that yes, my nose is big.  I thought that was funny. Then on our way out of the market, a young guy hanging out on his Honda scooter started asking Shaoyuan a bunch of questions about life in America.  The guy has watched too many movies.  He has the common misconception that a lot of people in developing countries share.  They think that all Americans are rich and can afford whatever we want.  He said that because American salaries are so much higher than in China, we must have a lot of money.  He and Shaoyuan argued about it for awhile, and then I was brought into the conversation.  I told him how much we pay for rent in Boston, and the poor guy almost fell over.  He thought that must be for a luxury apartment in downtown and couldn't believe when I told him, no - that's for fairly beat up old place in a residential area a half hour bus ride from downtown. Then he hit me with the doozie.  He said that he thinks all Americans must be able to walk into a hospital and be treated for free.  I feel a little bad about how hard I laughed at that one.  I think I made him feel a little bad, but it was just so absurd hearing that impression when we have one of the most expensive and poorly managed health care systems in the world.  Anyway, we ended up on a conversation about music, and it turns out he's a musician.  So we talked for awhile about different types of music.  I'm glad I'm in the nation of piracy, cause I just downloaded a p2p program and am in the middle of acquiring a significant collection of American music to burn for this guy.  He came by the station tonight and brought me an assortment of his favorite discs - an Uzbek trio of young women, a Kazakh band, two discs by a famous Ughyur musician, and a copy of his own band's CD.  He's a super nice guy, and you can see a bit of quiet frustration in his eyes - a sort of sadness.  He's really passionate about his music, even lived in Moscow for a year searching for inspiration to create something unique.  His band's disc is actually quite good, but it hasn't sold well, so they're all in a bit of a depression over it.  He sounds like he's got a good attitude about continuing to do it because he loves it though.

On a different subject - food. I finally got real milk!!!!!!!  Turns out the sour milk Shaoyuan brought me is very popular in China, so he thought I'd like it.  I felt a little bad about that.  I do sort of like it, but it isn't quite what I was craving and had in mind when I said I wanted "milk". Americans and Chinese just have very very different tastes on a lot of things.  But I did get pure, real, normal milk today, so that rocks my world.  What doesn't rock my world? Bitter melon.  That was on the dinner plate tonight.  Stir fried bitter melon and pork.  I couldn't even pick out the bits of pork, because they tasted like bitter melon.  Which is the foulest, least edible plant to the planet.  If you're not sure if you've tried bitter melon, you haven't.  If you had ever had the stuff, you'd never forget it.  You know how your tongue is divided into the different tasting centers?  Imagine that every single taste bud *except* for the ones that detect bitter have been obliterated, and the bitter ones have overcompensated for their absence.  Imagine the complete absence of the taste of anything *but* bitter.  And then amplify that 100,000 times.  It's shudder inducing.  Lemons are not bitter.  Lemons are sweet by comparison to bitter melon. There is nothing I can think of that is even close enough to evoking the experience of bitter melon. It's almost worth a trip to your local chinese market just to buy one and try this experience.  I've seen them in the US.  Go ahead.  Try it.  You know you're curious...