A little bit of thumb twiddling...

The good news is that the animals have started to come out and are beginning to breed. The bad news is that they aren't in great numbers yet, so it's going to be a little bit of a waiting game. The nights are still quite cold, so I think they're staying down in their little burrows and are only coming up in short stretches to feed and scurry home again. The folks collecting for us have been out about 4 hours in a night and are only seeing a handful of animals compared to 80 in a night when we were here later (when it was warmer) last year. But this means we'll get the early embryos when they're ready to start collectively "doing their thing".

In the meantime I'm finding ways of entertaining myself. I've learned from these field collections in China that I'm really good at being alone. Much better than I ever thought I was actually. I'm quite content to sit here and read some science for awhile, catch up online with friends, read a book, and just chill. The student I work with, on the other hand, is a little bit needy. So he comes round several times a day wanting me to entertain him. Which usually involves getting into some sort of argument about something. Maybe that's in part why I'm enjoying being alone so much. But the other good thing is that I'm starting to go running again. It's an awesome stress release and gets some of that cooped up energy out of me. Plus it's fun to see people's expressions. First of all, no one here goes running. So they all seem to think I'm a little insane with my sneakers on and my headphones in jogging around town. Second, my pale whiteness glows like the moon on a clear night around here and have the fairest hair around. So seeing me jog by is probably a bit of a sight. But most people smile, a few stare too awestruck to make much of an expression, and the kids will sometimes even say "hello". I had to jog through a group of about a dozen 10 year old boys the other day. Oh boy that was funny...

There is a young man in the town who I wrote about last year and again a few days ago. He's a musician who has been struggling with his friends to balance their passion with reality. It's a sad story, really. They collectively dumped their entire savings into producing a CD and printed thousands of copies with confidence that it would sell well and they would be on their way to stardom. Unfortunately that didn't happen, they're all broke, and they're in varying stages of depression. This young guy seems to be coping alright, but apparently several of his friends have gotten into drugs and drinking in excess. He said that's common in the music scene in China right now. It sounds like they're collectively going through a little bit of the middle class angst ridden thing that the US music scene saw in the 90s. "Oh woe is me, I have more money now but I'm still not happy with my life and no one understands" kind of thing. But he still loves music and was excited to hear that I brought my computer with my whole iTunes collection. So he plugged in his MP3 player, and I transferred about 3 Gb of stuff to him. That should keep him busy for a little while at least. He brought another bandmate last night, and we all sat up talking and listening to tunes for awhile. It was an interesting conversation (through translation) about traditional versus modern Chinese music styles, western influence, and language differences between English and Chinese. I asked, because of the tonality, if it is more difficult writing lyrics in Chinese and if there are any tonal constraints to the music so that you don't change the meaning. He said no, because the musical tonality is usually so different that it doesn't change the meaning, and that people with different regional dialects still understand each other. I understand, but it still seems funny to me. When people ask where in China I've visited before, no one ever understands me. I can say "Guilin" and "Chongqing" pronounced correctly but without the right tonality, and they look at me like I've spoken gibberish. So then I have to draw it out on a map or describe the location and sights, and then they say "Oh! Guilin" with an entirely different emphasis on the syllables, but it doesn't sound all that different to me. Language is fascinating...