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.