I was so hungry...

I ate a horse. Seriously. I ate horse meat tonight. I wouldn't have ordered it, and I don't feel so good about myself for doing it, but I believe in adapting and respecting a culture which includes eating pretty much anything (that's not obviously unsafe) that's put in front of me (with the exception of bugs). I had been invited to join another banquet in honor of an English couple and their son who are visiting to studying some of the chinese herbal plants. We went to a big multistory fancy "Uyghur" restaurant that's more in the Chinese style with Uyghur influence. The first restaurant I've been to here with security guards out front and a bag check before you walk in the front door. We were taken up an elevator to the third floor and ushered to a small banquet room where each seat had a hotpot burner with broth and the waitstaff passed out aprons.  What a scene. My good friend "Alice" (her English name) was instructed by the host to order, so a whole bunch plates of raw meat and vegetables came out onto the table. She seemed to take great pleasure in ordering some of the most expensive things on the menu knowing the host (a retired scientist and regional party official) wouldn't refuse. The meat and vegetables get dunked into the pot of boiling spicy broth until they're cooked and then fished out and eaten.  A small plate of what looked like sliced salami rolled around in front of me, and Alice gave a sly smile and said "horse". Really. Horse. So I took a piece to try it - in part so I can now say I've eaten horse.  It was already cooked - dry roasted and lightly smoked and tasted different from any other kind of meat I've had. Interesting.

Other than that I've just been spending my weekend in Urumqi arranging things to return to Fukang on Monday and dive into the dissections. I had to make a few solutions, so now all of that is done.  I needed to find a freezer and fortunately a professor here decided to buy a new small chest deep freeze for the lab and loan it to me first for a few weeks.  So we spent 2 hours yesterday and another 4 hours today running about between three different stores trying to find a freezer in stock that would be easy to get paid for by government money. As we were leaving the institute this morning, a throng of about 200 middle school students carrying pails of water rushed passed us led by kids holding red flags. I asked what in the world was going on, and my friends said it's international environment day. I thought they meant earth day, but that's not for a few more weeks.  I have no idea what was the holiday, but I saw so many ordinary people (not city workers) out cleaning things - street lamps, fences, bus stops. There was a whole line of about a dozen people with rags squatted down busy wiping the black grime off of a fence that runs between the street and sidewalk. All in business suits.  Common attire here.  Years ago I once saw a guy laying paving stones wearing a business suit and dress shoes.

And the first part of this week is the festival for the ancestors, so there are carts all over the city selling fake paper money, incense, plastic fruit, and small plastic trees.  The custom is to visit the cemeteries and give these offerings (burning the money) in honor of the ancestors. And since Monday and Tuesday are a holiday, everyone has had to work saturday and sunday to make up for the time. Fascinating...

Exhausted but satisfied

The breakfast bell rang early this morning, so I've only just gotten my shower this evening which is a good thing since I was filthy and covered in sand. We headed back to the spot where we set traps last night, and lo and behold I think we only lost one.  And I could be wrong on that.  I'm guessing because the spacing at one point was longer than it should have been, but I haven't yet counted.  It's too bad I have no interest in those stinking gerbils! Out of the 50 traps we placed yesterday, 12 had a gerbil in them but not a single jerboa. Some of that could have to do with the fact that we set them early in the day, and gerbils are diurnal.  So it's hard for a jerboa to land itself in an already occupied trap.  But regardless, fail. We did, however, see good jerboa tracks this time since the sand was dry.  They're pretty easy to tell since they are in pairs spaced about 10 inches between strides. The gerbils make scurrying tracks, so they're quite distinguishable from each other.  So the animals are out and now to catch them!

After collecting the traps, we drove up to the forestry station we'd been sent to where we thought the people were located who collected for me in the past. The driver didn't think the station was the right one when we passed it the first time, so he kept driving another 20 minutes or so until about 2 dozen pump jacks appeared on the horizon. Oil country.  The road was blocked off by a security station, and I muttered to one of my companions "this is not good for me" thinking they'd stop and check the car, but they just raised the arm and let us right through!  Super bad news. I recently heard a story (and my colleagues knew of the same) where an American was fined $4,000 for illegally obtaining GPS coordinates in Xinjiang. Military and oil field/refinery sites are particularly sensitive here.  And I'm not sure if my companions have a GPS in the car, but I hope not.  I could get in some trouble for having one "in my possession" even if it's not in *my* possession. So after I said "I can't be here", the driver chuckled a little but then agreed and whipped the car around to exit as quickly as we'd entered.

We headed back to the forestry station we'd passed after realizing that was probably the place we were looking for and waited and waited but no one showed up.  Turns out they had a kid turn sick and went to Fukang city for the day.  So we made our way back to the field station to wait for some phone calls to be returned and in the meantime got hooked up with the man I will call "The Fixer".  I remember him from before.  He's good at arranging things.  And he remembered me and the people we were talking about.  However it wasn't the family we had gone to visit today - it was another Kazakh family off along a different road.  So we loaded The Fixer into the car with us and went off to meet with the right family who did turn out to be the folks we've hired before.  A small leathery old man with green eyes and wearing a flat cap took us into a room to sit down for negotiations on the rug covered platform that doubles as the family bed. We came to an agreement for a set price per female jerboa they catch and bring to us for the hour drive to the field station.  Not a bad deal.  All were pleased, we provided them with nets and great headlamps, and we will see the outcome in a couple of days.

Wildlife abounds, but jerboas?

If you want to see what life is like without the EPA, come to a large city in northern China in the winter. There was still some snow on the ground when I arrived since they'd just had a heavy fall a few days previous, but by now what is left of the snow is indistinguishable from the road since everything is black.  It was raining yesterday, and the black on everything is so thick that it's difficult to tell if that's how the water falls from the sky.  And all along the sides of the road lies the detritus of lost items and litter that lay buried for the last few months. I know there is always some stuff left behind after the snows in Boston, but this is different.  It's like the piled high snow bank is just replaced with a smaller but no less impressive trash bank. It's a sight to behold.

But we are now up to clean air and brown brown brown as far as the eye can see.  Spring has not yet sprung here, and while it's not so cold anymore, it's clearly still on the crest of warming up. We arrived at Fukang in the late afternoon and were greeted by the woman who has run this place for as many years as I know.  She's not the director but rather the caretaker - dorm mom and keeper of the keys.  She remembered me from before and seemed overjoyed that I was back. But I am apparently too skinny.  This is common in China - the topic of weight is never off limits, and I have had people let me know if they think I have gained or lost weight. Then she went on telling my companions about how she and I have always been able to talk to each other even though we don't speak a word of the other's language.  She's so vocal and expressive, and I've always been able to tell from her gestures and the tone of her voice exactly what she was trying to tell me - whether we were fixing my toilet or finding a way for me to do laundry. And I know quickly if she's happy or annoyed. So it's good to see her again.

And the cook is the same.  He was busy tossing a mound of food in a giant wok set over a blazing propane fire when I walked in for dinner, so I just stood behind watching the food and sweat fly.  The caretaker walked in behind him and must have asked if he saw who was back, because he turned around with a look of utter shock on his face and said "You!" in English. He couldn't seem to get over staring at me (and also saying I'm thinner) and invited me to sit next to him among some of the other students at dinner.  His English isn't very good, but he tries really hard.  I asked about his cat. "Mou?" I asked, because he had a new kitten the last time I was here. "Died" was his blunt answer.  Poor kitty.

This morning after a breakfast of fermented tofu on steamed buns, rice and boiled peanut soup, spicy strands of seaweed, and a plate of mixed onion, peppers, and tomato in vinegar, we headed off in the jeep in search of the right kind of desert for jerboas.  I knew one of the places where we'd trapped animals with snap traps before, so we went up the highway to some of those dunes and walked around for a bit looking for tracks.  It rained last night, so where we could see tracks they were too dampened down by the rain to tell if they were jerboa or gerbil.  There are a lot of gerbils around here.  Nasty critters.  So we decided to go back to the jeep and loaded up with 50 traps, peanut butter, and a bag of oats to walk along a trail and set live traps for the night. Every 20 steps I scooped some bait into the trap with a stick and set it, and at every 5th trap we placed a flag to mark the line so they wouldn't get lost.  I hope they don't get trampled by goats or stolen by herders since those are borrowed and will be expensive to replace.  But fingers crossed we have more than gerbils by morning.  The driver said there was no reason to mark where we started since he's sure to remember.  I took note of the surroundings just in case.  Road marker 535 between the radio tower and the big blue sign - past the third herd of camels on the left. Love camels.

On the way back to the field station, we stopped by a yurt on the side of the road to see if we could persuade people to do some catching for us tonight.  It was an older Kazakh couple who were crouched over a goat in a pen as we walked up.  They must have thought we were an obnoxious group of tourists since while I was just pleasantly smiling and doing my best to put them at ease, my colleagues were eagerly snapping photographs. It was something to see though - the woman was in a red/orange/pink brocade jacket with coordinating scarf over her head, and she and her husband where holding a goat down on the ground so her two newborn kids could nurse.  The poor little things couldn't have been more than a day old and still had recently dried bits of afterbirth attached to their fur and incompletely resolved umbilical cords.  One was stronger than the other and kept pushing his sibling away.  Neither could get firmly up on all four feet and kept stumbling forward on their ankles before toppling flat on the ground.  I hope they make it but they seem so vulnerable and stand only maybe 10 inches from the ground. It's a tough life out here. 

We asked about jerboas in the area, and the woman said she thought she knew what we were talking about and had a dead one.  She led us over near the remains of a fire where it seems the animal had been attracted to the light and was killed.  Gerbil. Stupid stupid gerbil.  So we thanked her and drove on to the local forestry station since I knew we had hired a family to catch for us before who work at one of the forestry stations.  The men at this station knew the animals, said yes we are in the right place, they are further into the desert, and there is a family at the field station further away who we should talk to.  I have a good feeling these are the people we hired before, and we are headed there tomorrow to investigate and negotiate. Fingers crossed...

Grassroots Diplomacy

Today was extraordinarily educational.  It started with a long meeting with a professor at the Academy who has spent his whole career studying the mammals of Xinjiang - including an extensive study of more that 70 species of rodents about 20 years ago.  He knows the jerboa habitats and how to catch them, so tomorrow I am going to buy a 200 meter long, 2 meter wide net to stretch across the desert and catch jerboas that get tangled as they're hopping across in search of food.  Apparently if you go in the early morning before they get a chance to chew their way out,  you can pluck them off the net unharmed and alive.  We will see how well this works, but I am of the opinion that just about anything is worth a try.  He seemed thrilled to teach me all he knows and wants to take me deep into the Taklamakan (one of the largest deserts) in search of more jerboas.  Unfortunately that's about a 2 day drive and not suitable for my current itinerary, but image search Taklamakan to see why that would be pretty freaking awesome.

The rest of the evening was spent in fascinating conversation with a dear friend of mine from years past.  I told him that I was back in Urumqi, and we were planning to see each other, but I happened to run into him on the sidewalk yesterday just by chance.  It's been three years, so he looks older and has  suddenly turned from a fresh faced young college student to a young man. I recognized him but didn't want to make the assumption in case it was just someone who looked very similar, so I smiled big, and his face burst into shock and disbelief followed by a bright grin.  There are two different cultural reasons why the Chinese and Uygurs don't hug.  The Chinese have more personal space in individual interactions (though not in a crowd) and exhibit less physical affection.  The Uygur women who are my close friends will hug me and hold my hand.  But Uygur men of strict religious faith won't even touch a woman who is not a wife or relative.  My friend isn't that strict, but I know better than to throw my arms around him in a big bear hug, even though I think I could tell he sort of wanted to do the same.  Instead we approached each other with one palm out face forward to intertwine our fingers and clasped each others' hand in a way that was like the best hug I could have gotten.  It's so good to see him.

We took a long walk yesterday but spent most of the time just catching up on the civilities of the last 3 years.  What each of us has been up to professionally and future plans.  Today we met up again and went to dinner where we spent at least 2 hours lost in conversation like old times.  I have had the best conversations with him about cross-cultural comparisons, and we joked today that it's like we are cultural ambassadors for each of our groups. He told me some pretty amazing things that he's been taught in his community lately.  That the Free Masons have met as a secret society in the UK to discuss the problem of overpopulation and what to do about it - distribute poisoned medication as charity in developing countries to kill off large numbers of poor people.  So some people here will no longer take medicines that are made overseas.  He knew that Lady Gaga had worn a meat dress, and his imam said this is considered normal in the West and is an example of why young people here shouldn't have access to the internet. And that the US military was somehow responsible for the earthquake in Sichuan. He seemed to be telling me all of this as if he hoped I would refute it all but he didn't quite know what to believe.  I reassured him that this is me.  I am American.  This is American.  Not these propaganda stories he's been hearing.  But it goes a long way to explain the mistrust and downright hatred towards us in this part of the world.

But I also explained to him that it goes both ways and that I am doing my best to do the same for him and his culture that I hope he is doing for me and mine.  That there are a lot of Americans who think all Muslims are violent extremists.  That most Americans have never met anyone who follows Islam and don't understand that it's a different culture, but we are all the same at the core.  We had a really long and fascinating conversation about comparative religion and the steps from Judaism to Christianity to Islam and how similar it is to the story of the Tower of Babel - a story that is common to all of our religions because we start from the same book. And I learned a lot about the Islamic belief of conversion and redemption and how they see religion as a choice of free will. And we talked about how faith is not the problem, and at the core each of the religions is really not so different.  But just as some Christians choose to believe the parts of their faith that support their personal ideology and thus have started many of the world's most brutal wars, many Muslims now do the same.  People are the problem.  Lack of education and mutual understanding is the problem. Every time I come here, I have some of the most insightful and educated conversations with him, and it's always a delight.

Other than that being the same, a lot of the neighborhood where I have lived before is different.  I will refrain from writing more while I am here, but suffice to say there is a lot of new development.  A lot.  The people are still the same.  The culture is still the same.  The context is different.  And it's interesting.  Makes me wish I'd taken more pictures.

Bed for now and off to the desert tomorrow...

Forbid nippingcurved and roll over and close to the heat source

Instructions on the back of my hotel room card.  Apparently in Chinese it says "Do not bend the card or place it close to a heat source".

The last couple of days were eventful. Friday morning I was met at my hotel and escorted to the main building of the CAS to give a seminar on my research.  It went really well.  I had a lot of interest and some pretty good questions all around.  Most were interested in how to catch and how to raise the animals.  There is a lab here that is interested in studying hibernation in the jerboas, so I'll be doing my best to advise.  That same lab is also doing genetic barcoding of a variety of species in Xinjiang, including the rodents, so it looks like I have extra company for at least part of the field collections.  Fantastic for me.  I could use as much help as people are willing to offer.

After a tour of the lab spaces, including a room with five small areal surveillance aircraft and another room with a nice new fancy scanning electron microscope, I headed back to my room to rest for a bit before the scheduled tour of the natural history museum. They have a fantastic museum here, a really wonderful educational resource. The animal rooms have mounts of many of the species that are native to Xinjiang, and they were incredibly well prepared.  The feathers and fur are in excellent condition with really good eyes and mounted in postures that make them look ready to leap right off their perch and out the door. More importantly, they have about a half dozen jerboas that are all in accurate postures.  This is in stark contrast to all of the mounts I've seen in the US and in London that are contorted and weirdly posed in ways you just really don't ever see of a live jerboa.  So I guess it does make a big difference for the preparator to actually see the animal their stuffing while it's still alive.

After the tour I was whisked away in a black towncar to a restaurant on an upper floor of a highrise building and down the hall to a private dining room.  Ahhhh, the Chinese banquet.  They lulled me into a false sense of comfort with their low key first evening when in fact I was not getting off easy. I know enough by now to linger about the edge of the table while everyone fusses and argues over the seating arrangement.  I sit where I'm told to sit, when I'm told to sit.  The custom is that the seat furthest from and facing the door is reserved for the host.  The seats to the right and left are seats of honor.  And then it goes around the table from there.  I was second to the right of the host.  Not bad.  The other, more important seats were reserved for directors of the Xinjiang Normal University. Chinese banquets are lavish affairs with about twenty times more food on the table than the guests could or will ever consume.  There is a lazy susan at the center of the table, and you just grab whatever looks appealing as it glides by.  Fortunately, I am happy to just eat whatever lands in front of me without asking what it is.  One of the first things I picked up was what I thought was some kind of mushroom.  The taste and texture was not inconsistent with that inoffensive thought...and then the professor to my right leaned in to tell me I'd just eaten chicken stomach.  Delightful.  But you really never know what you're going to get, so it's best to keep an open mind.

And while I didn't get the highest seat of honor, I did get the fish.  The last dish to hit the table is the whole fish.  And the lazy susan gets turned about until the head is pointing straight at the guest of honor. The person who gets the head gets to take the first bite of the fish.  I asked to be sure that didn't mean I had to actually eat the head.  But what they failed to tell me until later is that if the honored guest takes a full drink of baiju (I'll get to that later), he or she can then order the others at the table to take certain parts of the fish - the eyeballs, lower jaw, dorsal fin.  Each has some specific symbolism that I can't remember because by that point I'd had too much baiju.

Ah, the baiju.  Chinese for rotgut white lightening. 65% alcohol served in tiny little eyewash glasses.  The glasses are deceitful and make you think you aren't drinking as much as you are.  This is also the first time I was introduced to the culture of the three toasts. At past banquets, the host gives a speech and everyone drinks. Then another important person will speak, and everyone drinks. Then the guest gives a speech, and well, you get the picture.  This time there were those same kinds of speeches, but the host gives three speeches that can be interspersed with other speeches, but they are all group speeches.  Once the host gives the third speech, then the party can move on to the one on one more casual toasts.  The foreigner is always the target in curiosity - how much can you drink? And it's very critical to doing business in China.  I heard this time that there is a written law in Beijing that says no business can be conducted without baiju.  I think the top politicians in this country must have liver disease by now.  It's a way of showing your strength, your happiness, your honor.  I managed to show remarkable strength and made a good impression on my hosts without spilling my "honor" in front of anyone. Business has officially begun.

But that made yesterday kind of sort of suck. I crawled out of bed at 10:30 only long enough to get breakfast before they closed and then crawl back into bed until 1 pm. Then I managed to hook up with Sarah and her boyfriend Charles to go to the Texas Cafe for a real hobbit style "second breakfast" of honest to goodness authentic biscuits and gravy.  That helped quite a bit. Later in the afternoon, I disappeared off with Xu Feng to do some shopping for the fieldwork, and we ended up in the most awesome market area ever. We wandered through the lumber yard, past the flower market, and into the pet area to see turtles, salamanders, tons of fish, some frogs, loads of birds, puppies, kittens, and the very very unfortunate cages that barely contained rather large dogs.  We were searching for large fishing landing nets to catch the jerboas and found them in this spectacular multistory megamall that was all fish stuff.  Store after store after store of fish, aquariums, and aquarium supplies.  I still do not understand the Asian phenomena of shopping areas where every business sells the exact same thing. But it was a wonderous thing wandering three floors of expensive aquariums wondering who in this area could possibly afford this, but as I've learned there are apparently a lot of folks in this region with a bucket ton of $$$.

And then it was off to the Fubar! I first discovered the Fubar 4 years ago and have since become good friends with one of the owners.  Read back to the end of my last time in China to see why Hiro is my hero - he got my food poisoned and dehydrated self into the "best" hospital in Urumqi.  So it was good to see him and to see the old bar and do some people watching for the night.  Again, more changes have come in the years since I've been gone.  Affluence.  Unbelievable affluence. This used to be a backpacker bar.  It still has its share of foreign travelers and expats, but it's gotten too expensive to be a watering hole for the vagrant westerners.  Instead it's full of large groups of multinationals from around this region - lots of rich Russians in particular.  As well as upper class Uygurs and Chinese. And there's an attitude that pervades - an attitude of snobbishness that says "I'm better than all the rest of you, and more importantly I can *buy* you".  Hiro tells me he had to start putting a price to "buy" a table (minimum order) because fights were breaking out when the occasional rich Russian would come in and demand people who weren't spending the kind of money he was willing to spend should vacate their table for him.  Perhaps not the way I would have handled it.

So last night ended at 3 am, I'm completely beat after two nights out on the town, and perfectly happy to turn in early and quietly. More planning and preparing tomorrow, and we should be leaving for the field station on Tuesday. Off to the peace and quiet of the desert.

Happy Dance

I know maybe I will jinx myself by getting too excited too early, but so far this visit is going exceedingly well. I was met at the airport in Urumqi by the young assistant professor (more like a postdoc by the American system) who will accompany me to the field station and assist with the work.  He's kind and quiet with really good English. I think he'll be an excellent companion.  After getting me checked into the hotel and a nice rest for a bit, he met me again to take me to dinner with the two older professors who have been helping to arrange all of this planning.  Read back to previous entries to understand my past experience, and you'll know why I was expecting a private smoke filled room with a giant round table of excessive amounts of food and people in suits who speak little English.  I was stunned to walk into a nice recently renovated restaurant where I was led to a small table to join the two professors and an American woman working at their institute.  Everyone was casually dressed (and me in my suit), and they were light hearted and fun sharing travel stories and jokes about the difficulties of learning new languages.  The American, Sara, is working at the Institute as a manuscript editor so that she can improve her already very good Chinese. After a really fun meal, where I applied my previous knowledge of how it is impolite to discuss work over the first dinner party, Sara and I went to the local KFC for milk tea and shared stories about our experiences living and working in this strange land. She's great fun and enthusiastic, and I think I have her interested enough to overcome her fear of camel ticks and perhaps join us at the field station.  I am going to pitch the idea to our colleagues of how useful it would be for her to learn more about the process of science and to develop a relationship with me and Xu Feng while we work in the desert so that perhaps she can help in the future with establishing international research connections and helping to write international funding applications from the Chinese side.  Plus it would just be good to have another set of hands to help set traps and catch rodents. And more good company for me.

This morning I gave a seminar at the Chinese Academy on the work that I'm doing and included some ideas for collaborative projects that we could work on together.  I think I generated a lot of interest and got a ton of questions at the end.  Several people here are studying biodiversity and cataloging the wildlife that is found in Xinjiang, so they are interested in perhaps sampling some of the species with me.  I think this could turn into a much bigger project than just what I am planning for myself, which would be really great for them and great for me to generate even more enthusiasm and offers of assistance. I'm just overjoyed by how helpful everyone has been already and look forward to getting out into the desert and getting busy.

It's been an eventful 36 hours since I started this post, but since it's 3 am here and I'm exhausted, I'm turning in and will update again soon.  Suffice it to say all continues to go well, and I'm having an excellent time.

Nihao from Shanghai

First, 14 hours is longer than any person should ever have to be trapped in barely more than their own immediate personal space in a semi-upright posture when you really really really want to sleep.  But I made it and managed to sleep just enough in transit to not be completely wrecked on arrival. Now that I'm showered and refreshed, I'm looking forward to a good night of solid horizontal sleep.

It's been three years since I was last in China, and while I've only been to Shanghai once for a couple of days, I can already feel that China is (to borrow my favorite Thai phrase) "same same, but different." I can't pin it just yet, but it does seem to be the effects of the lurching economic boom.  So many of the cars leaving the airport were Audis, VWs, and big Buick SUVs. It's still the same place - dirt and soot tainted buildings, ladies on rickety wooden chairs selling phone cards, street vendors grilling all things on sticks and littering the gutters with the skins of pineapples.  But there's an air all about that things are happening here.  For one, the corner grocery store I'd been to before is now a Walmart...

Me and my three enormous pieces of luggage toting live animal traps are checked into a hotel with my friend Zhe near the campus of East China Normal University.  I finally got an answer for what the "Normal" means.  Seems so weird to a native English speaker that "Normal" would be chosen as part of a University's name. What's considered an "Abnormal" university?  Apparently it means that it's a teaching college.  Still not sure exactly where the "Normal" arises out of "teaching college", but I'm satisfied enough with that answer.

We went to dinner with Zhe's advisor here who is an outrageously outgoing with a huge personality.  He hugs me whenever he sees me.  That's the first and biggest thing that makes him stand out.  He's traveled extensively and says he has to get out of China every couple of years.  I can completely identify with that, however I can't even wait two years between trips. So he's seen a lot of the world and explained to me last time I was here that he hugs me because "Americans like to hug". He's extremely, and rightfully, proud of his lab.  He has a magnetic board with all of the lab publications, and across the top of each in red marker he's written "I.F.=" and a number indicating the impact factor of the journal.  He was a little bit distressed that some of his best papers are missing, but that's apparently because there are 8 new fresh faced prospective masters students who are on the Chinese university equivalent of "Survivor." I guess they're brushing up on what the lab does and trying to out compete each other to make a good impression since only 5 can stay. He had them all come over and introduce themselves to me so that I could assess their English and tell him who he should take.  They were all so cute and enthusiastic and impressed on me how much they REALLY REALLY want to be chosen for "Mr. Zhang's" lab. As if they thought my opinion could make or break their future. I couldn't give an opinion and crush any single one of them, so when Shuyi went one by one asking of a few "what do you think of this one? and this one?" I just kept saying "very good". So he pointed at himself and said "What about me?" to which I responded with a half cocked brow, "Ehhhhh..." and he burst into laughter and hugged me again.  I think we get each other.

But truthfully, his surged to near the top of my favorite labs when I had the sudden realization looking at his publication wall of fame that *THIS* is the lab that published the bat fellatio paper last year!!  I told him I thought that was cool because it got so many people in the general public interested in the oddness of it, and he told me they got an IgNobel prize for that work. Also hilarious. 

One more day in Shanghai, and I travel onward to Urumqi on Thursday. Incidentally, I forgot that blogspot was also banned in China in 2009, and it apparently hasn't come back online. As such I'm posting this via an email submission so if anyone gets a chance to let me know if this posts okay, I'd greatly appreciate it.