Today my lunch had eyeballs...

Tiny little shrimps. Some of you may have noticed that my food obsession from Spain has been absent in China. There's a distinct reason for that, besides last year's food poisoning. While there is a lot of good food to be had here, much of it is nothing to write home about. The cook at the field station is actually quite good, which is nice if you have to eat the food that one person is preparing three times a day for more than a month. And I'm lucky - a lot of field biologists and paleontologists get by on canned and freeze dried non-perishable things. We are at least in civilization. But I'm a little repulsed by plates of fatback swimming in grease, and the long slices of some sort of vegetable in a shrimp gravy with tiny arthropods staring their beady little eyes at me. Especially when I've seen piles of these dried shrimps out in the hot sun swarming with flies. But you eat what's put in front of you. Even if it's the freshwater fish that everyone here is so fond of. It's really tasty, but there is no concept of the "fillet" here. Fish is either served whole with the head and fins intact, or it's chopped up into little bits bones and all. I just can't work that hard for my food, and I've been stabbed in the tongue too many times by needle-fine ribs.

But one really good thing is that students here have finally started talking to me. You can set your calendar by Chinese shyness - 2 1/2 weeks after arrival. The same happened last year. I sit in the cafeteria, walk through the labs, wander the grounds of the field station, and people smile with a tiny bit of fear in their eyes. Then eventually a few will start to say "hello", and finally they are brave enough to show that they really can speak and understand me. They spend those first two weeks afraid that their pronunciation and grammar isn't good enough and worried about bothering me. So two of the students - they're plant biologists working on other projects, not with us - brought me fruit the other day as an opportunity to reach out and be brave. That was really sweet. And it'll fend off the scurvy...

Ironically, those here who talk to me the most are the ones who know the least English. One is Ms. Guo who runs this place. As in she's always clipping around in heels, barking orders, changing sheets, and vacuuming hallways. She's super loud and smiley and seems to absolutely love me even though we can't understand a word the other is saying. She's the one with whom I pantomimed through a laundry washing last year. Another is a woman who seems to be here with her boyfriend. I don't know her name, but in my head she's the nagging girlfriend. She's always squawking at her super shy boyfriend and getting him to wash her dishes. She speaks absolutely no English, but she sometimes follows me around watching me work and talking up a storm as if she expects me to suddenly understand Chinese. She's been trying to teach me some Chinese words, but I'm afraid I'm a horrible language student. The third super outgoing non-English speaker is the laughing Buddha. I also don't know his name, but he was here last year. He's the one who got me in an awful lot of trouble over a bottle of scotch and a bottle of whiskey. Ouch. One should never do shots of really good expensive scotch. And one should always be wary of the words "how much baijiu can you drink?" Unfortunately my colleagues now know I have a pretty hefty tolerance, and they often answer that question for me before I get a chance to understate my "talent".