Only at Carnival...

It was fabulous. We arrived in Santonia at about 7:30 pm after a long day walking all around Santander, and the Carnival parade had just started. I don’t know who won the costume contest, but they were all a lot of fun. Like the Transformers who stopped once in awhile along the parade route and transformed into cars and airplanes. But one of the most fun, for me at least, was Barack and Michelle Obama complete with the Secret Service. It wasn’t just them – it was the fact that later in the night they met up with random other people who were dressed as Al Qaeda, Talibanis, and the Saudis. So many different and fun costumes, many of which wouldn’t go over so well in the States, and many were very driven by American and world politics. I saw more US Army and Navy costumes than you’d see in San Diego on ship leave. But if only the real world could bring opponents to such a fun and slovenly drunken place to sort out their differences…

Early in the evening was full of families and kids running around. Carnival is kind of like Halloween on steroids. There are no age restrictions, everyone’s in costume, and everyone is in group costume. It was amazing. Whole families – mom, dad, and a couple of kids – dressed as lions or ducks or clowns, or priests and nuns. My favorite was the little toddler dressed as a priest sucking on a pacifier on a white chain. So incredibly wrong but so cute. Then as the night wore on and the families disappeared, the younger crowd came out in all sorts of costumes. Mostly men in drag. But not like Brazilian Carnival men in fabulous sequins and feathers-type drag. Men in high-necked dresses with long skirts and their hair in Spanish buns with lots of makeup and rich red lipstick. The gals we met up with, Rocio and her friends who live in Santonia, were all dressed as punk rockers. And they brought costumes for me and Federica. We were “Little Red Riding Hood”. Cute. Very cute.

There were two big stages set up in town with music blasting until 7 or 8 in the morning, and the squares were both packed full at least until we caught the bus back to Santander at 4:30 am. It was good fun, dancing in the streets all night. But we were clearly not the professional party type. No, those were the kids who had packed 2-liter bottles of cocktails to power their alcohol fueled all night frenzy. 4:30 am was late enough for me. I zonked for the entire 30 minute bus ride back, and the 10 minute walk to my apartment was the longest trudge ever known to mankind.

So the next morning, we drove with Marta to visit Comillas. Ok, truth be told, it was afternoon before I dragged out of my apartment. But Comillas was nice and very worth the effort. It’s a village by the ocean that is typical Spanish with windy little streets and old houses. There is an old gothic chapel on a hill that has been converted to a walled-in cemetery. Unfortunately the two main attractions, Gaudi’s house and the religious university that he designed, were both closed for renovations, so we only got to see those from a distance and through scaffolding. But it was a nice visit and better than lying in bed all day. Which is probably what I would have done if not forced into the alternative.

One more full day and then I’m back to Boston. It’s been a great visit both for work and for fun. I haven’t wanted to turn this into a boring lab notebook, but suffice it to say that the main reason I came out here has turned out well. The work was accomplished, and I feel sufficiently trained to go back and do this myself. That is until sometime in the middle of the summer when things might just have to “stop working” so that I have a reason to come back and hang out on the beach, er, I mean slave away in the lab again. I’ve made some really good friends, eaten a lot of great food, had a lot of great drink, and stored away some “reserves” for the imminent trip to China. So stay tuned sometime around March 23rd for that one if you want to follow along some more…

P.S. I added a picture to the post below. This was taken on the subway in Bilbao. The first panel is “don’t hold the door”. The second panel is “don’t enter when the alarm is sounding”. And the third panel clearly reads “don’t sit while conjoined triplets are standing.”

Many animals died in the creation of this blog post...

I have an interesting observation about the old ladies in the north of Spain. I like to call them "The Fur Coat Ladies" or "The Fur Coat Clones". They're all the same, one right after another in a sourpuss brigade of fluff scuttling down the streets all day. And they all have the same expression of general disdain for someone who might otherwise be enjoying life. So I've developed a new game - to try to get them to smile. They all have the same old lady scowl, and if you smile at them their face turns even more into a lemon pucker. But every once in awhile I win when one of them flickers an unconscious smile back.

It's been a great few days, and I've discovered that the world (at least in science) is very small indeed. I've known for a few weeks that a woman from a lab in London was coming to give a seminar and get recruited for a position at a new institute here in Santander. I felt like her name was familiar, but couldn't place her until we got to the airport (me and Marian) to pick her up. Marian was digging through her bag and not paying attention when Federica passed through the doors from baggage claim, and so I saw her first. Yep, I know her. And she didn't see Marian but saw me. And wasn't expecting someone she met once in Wood Hole a year ago to show up out of nowhere in an airport in Spain when she's here for an interview. It was quite a priceless look on her face. So fortunately for me, I have a travel buddy for a few days. She's staying through Sunday evening to see some of the area, so we traveled together today to Bilbao and are going to Santona tomorrow for Carnival. Sinfully glutinous fun.

Bilbao was great but mostly because of the Guggenheim. The building is a Frank Gehry work of abstract steel curvature, and the galleries inside are all off of a main cathedral-vaulted central entrance. There are two major installations. One of Murakami - a Japanese artist who does ridiculously brightly colored anime-style paintings and sculptures and another by Richard Serra - an America "sculptor", of sorts, who creates 12 foot tall steel structures that are meant to sort of bend your perception of space and time. They gave me the feeling of what I would imagine walking inside of a rosebud to feel like - you enter in one place and walk around and round to the center of the sculpture. But sometimes the big steel plates curve inward or outward with respect to each other and psychologically force your body to tilt in that direction even though there is plenty of room to walk perfectly upright. And sometimes the steel echos your footsteps, voice, and giggle so that it sounds like there are duplicates of you wandering between the giant plates. But my favorite was an installation by someone whose name I didn't even catch that was a series of 10 digital light boards about 6 inches wide that reached from floor to ceiling in the central entryway. They ticker-scrolled words up and down and backwards that were essentially the description of an obsessive relationship that goes badly. They're very short sentences "I see you. I breathe you. I tickle you." and then it goes badly "I need you. I follow you." and then worse "I bury my head. I bury your head. I cry." and then there's brief reconnection and a final end. For some reason the way it was presented in the flow of short text was very emotionally dramatic.

So from the Guggenheim we wandered through the city to the old part of Bilbao and into a cafe on the central square after watching the kids wander the streets in their carnival costumes. 6 glasses of wine, two glasses of Pacharan, and 10 pinchos later it was time to catch our bus back to Santander. The last bus was at 11:30. We left the bar at 10:20 and started following the compass in my head that rarely fails me in getting from point A to point B. Except there was an enormous hill between those two points, and the Lonely Planet fails to make their maps topographical. Add to that the fact that alcohol diminishes my sense of distance, and we were in a rough state. So after asking a few very helpful locals, we managed to find the metro and get on a sensible train back around to the bus station with time to spare to pass out on the last bus leaving for the night.

And the food. The pinchos in the bar were delightful and deserve a description. We had a wafer thin pastry cone that was crispy fried and filled with chorizo, mushrooms, and grilled vegetables topped with snowflake-finely grated cheese (asiago, perhaps?). Then rounds of delicately tender beef cooked rare and wrapped around bacon and cheese on grilled leeks on top of a slice of baguette. And finally a soft white fish battered and lightly fried with thin slices of jamon and a single tiny sage leaf on top. All spectacular and unique. And I'm already hungry for them again...

I love the Spanish mullet

It's pervasive and beautiful. In an ironic sort of way. So many young men in Spain have a fabulous mullet that is either all shaggy and distinctively "business in the front, party in the back" or the alternative "business in the front, Bob Marley in the back" dredlocked version. Awesome.

Today was quite a good day. It's been a long week of hard work, so I look forward to the weekends very much. And bonus for today is that it was sunny. Very sunny. Cold and windy, but the first time that I could walk outside and feel bright warm rays on my translucently greenish skin. I think I was starting to grow my own colony of lichen from all of the damp cool air and long hours sitting almost mime-like hunched over the microscope. So I took advantage of the day, after a brief trip to lab, to roam the town a bit. I wandered over to the cathedral coincidentally right as the church bells started to toll to call for 5 o'clock Mass. It was an amazing cacophony as two off the bells swung around and around about their mounting - four chimes per rotation of each iron bell off set from each other in a succession of impressive clanging. As the rotation slowed and the tolling subsided, the peals softened until there was an almost mournful trail of the final soft tones, calling all late comers to scurry up the steep stone steps of the cathedral.

I met Rushi precisely at 5 pm on the steps of the town hall, and he was hardly awake. That's part of why I arranged to spend the day with him - to drag him out into the sun for some much needed fresh air for both of us. The first words out of his mouth were "churros? I'm hungry." Oh yes. So we went to a little cafe that Marian says has been just the same for as long as she can remember. It's one of those places that was first decorated in the 1950s and hasn't changed even the placement of tables ever since. Churros are sticks of fried doough Fried dough wins in any form in my book, and churros are super awesome. They're served with chocolate in a small cup that's almost the consistency of pudding and rich but not very sweet. You dip the churros in the chocolate, and they're perfect. So after churros and chocolate, we wandered over to the waterfront and Rushi wanted coffee. I teased that we were just going to move from churros to coffee to beer to wine to dinner to cocktails, and that's pretty much the progression of the night.

We ended up around the other side of the peninsula in Sardinero which is more of an upscale ocean-front part of Santander and had a few beers in an "Irish Pub" overlooking fishing boats lit up on the ocean. Then we realized we were hungry and ready to move back into the main part of town. We decided to return to the restaurant where I got just a tease of a taste of pinchos last weekend but figured we would take a bus rather than walk in the cold wind. Best. Decision. Ever. That was the most entertaining bus ride of my life. Of course it's valentine's day which is apparently not much of a holiday here amongst the other crowd but is picking up steam with the younger kids. So one stop after we boarded, a hoard of dozens of kids no older than 18 get on the bus, and it's totally like a grade school dance - girls at the back of the bus and boys at the front. Half of the girls were wearing cheap plastic tiaras with pink feathers and were dressed in high heels and short skirts. And then they started to sing. Rushi said it was something about how this is a special day, etc etc. And then the boys all started clapping in rhythm and singing their own song but as more of a lyrical rap type performance. Completely surreal and like some bizzare scene out of "Westside Story". And even though the two groups of guys and gals didn't interact for the whole bus ride, they all got out at the same destination. And presumably proceeded to stand across the room from each other for the rest of the night.

So we ended up at the pinchos place and found our little spot at the end of the bar, ordered 5 pinchos, and devoured those in less than 2 minutes. We stuffed ourselves. I think our server was a little bit appalled since the tradition in spain is to have a couple in one place and then move along to the next destination. But they're so good. It's my ideal food - three perfect bites. One as the new discovery, one bite to appreciate the mix of flavors, and the last bite to part ways and prepare for the next delightful treat. For those who missed the earlier post, pinchos are mostly piles of stuff on bread. Sometimes it's some sort of meat with mushrooms or tuna with anchovies or fried quail egg with spanish ham or egg with potato or potato with octopus, but they're all yummy. And since it's difficult to decide we just kept telling the guy "bring us 5 more that we haven't already had" and ended up with 15 in total. They're cheap which is cool, but our tab still ended up being a mile long with 15 pinchos, 4 beers, and 2 after dinner liquors to make it all settle a little better. Then we moved to a bar in the square that has outside seating and "people watched" all of the groups of made up gals tottering on high heels, the groups of international students who had recently arrived, the drunken men oscillating between threatening to punch each other followed by "I love you man" making up. I'm glad Rushi is only part adopted Spanish and yet still enough Indian to recognize that 2 am is late enough and not try to keep me out until past 5 in the morning again. Especially since tomorrow is supposed to be another beautiful sunny day...

"My room has no strength"

Yep, that's what I said. That's apparently why Carmen looked at me so strangely. When I told the lab folks what happened, they started laughing at me. I looked up all of the words in my handy little phrasebook, but I should have looked up "electricity" instead of "power". Apparently the literal translation for "power" doesn't cover electrical power. Only physical power. Oops. So now I'm looking up spanish words but then looking the same word up in the "spanish-english" section to confirm that the meaning is really what I want to say. Oh well, at least I figured out where the breaker box is which is good. It seems that the burners on my stove are the problem. If I have both going at once, it trips the breaker.

So I am now fully recovered from my second all night out partying with the Spanish. It's the first on this trip but pretty much a redux of my experience in El Escorial in August. A group of us started in a little bar in the market downtown and then moved on to a place for "pinchos" for dinner. Pinchos are a type of tapas. Basically, it's a bunch of stuff on slices of baguette or piles of stuff in little pastry cups. They're totally delish. Absolutely fabulous. And unless you eat enough of them, not. filling. at. all. It was me, Rushi, Irene, and two other gals they know. The girls (me excluded) were all eating super slowly like little birds while Rushi and I hovered around the edge drooling thinking "are you going to eat that?" They ordered three rounds of food (one thing per person per round) and then were ready to move on to the next location. My first thought was "Sweet. These were tasty appetizers, and now we're off to dinner." Nope. We were off to another bar. To be followed by another and then a dance club until they upped the lights and shooed everyone out at 4:30 am. So by the time I got home, famished, at about 5 am I was still awake enough to throw together a sandwich to curb the hunger. I so want to go back to that place with Rushi and/or Marta, belly up to the bar, and just eat my fill of those things. Super yum.

Yeah, so I managed to have my early morning post-bar snack and stay up late (early?) enough to re-hydrate and metabolize some of the alcohol in my blood stream so that Sunday was not so painful. Albeit, I woke up at 11 am and napped again from noon to nearly 2, but it sounds like I was better off than most of the others. Sundays are gloriously lazy here. It's easy to lounge without feeling guilty when there are few other options. Besides watching "Abre Los Ojos" which is an awesome movie. It's the Spanish version (original version) of "Vanilla Sky" directed by Amenebar. He also did "The Others" with Nicole Kidman and (my favorite) "The Sea Inside". If you haven't seen that last one, go rent it. It's a wonderful flick. It's in the same vein as "Talk to Her" and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" - also great movies.

Let there be light...

I really should have been sound asleep 2 hours ago since there are many many eggs to be dealt with, but I'm ever nocturnal and it's sometimes a challenge to force myself down at night. So one blog entry, and I'm off to dream land.

I've had more semi-bilingual adventures of late. Yesterday was a fun Spanglish lab meeting. We covered a paper that's a big fat whopping review of a bunch of complicated models without a whole lot of consensus, and I give huge props to my Spanish colleagues for the effort to conduct the discussion in English even though it's not a comfortable conversational language for all of them. The result was that the conversation was held more or less twice - once in english with me included and a reiterated and continued discussion in spanish for those who struggled a little through the english. 2 hours, and we only got through the first half of the paper. To be continued monday. Most of the folks at the medical campus speak and understand a good amount of english - it is an academic center after all, but a some of them focus on reading and writing papers and don't have much opportunity to speak. They're the easy ones to pick out because there's a bit of a deer in headlights look when I approach. Like today when Marian asked Mamen to help me with a protocol. Poor thing. Mamen is so sweet and smiley and is always singing or making funny noises and happily bouncing around the lab, but she turned flush red and quivery when she came up to me. She apologized that she'd been avoiding me because she was afraid to try to speak english with me, but she underestimates her abilities, and we communicated quite well. Though she insisted Irene stay nearby to bail her out in case she panicked. I keep telling everyone they should feel good because everyone's english is FAR better than my pathetic Spanish.

And today my lack of Spanish got put to the test again when I had just gotten home, got all comfy, started arranging dinner, and *pop* the power goes out. But only in my room. The hall lights were on, and I could hear TVs in other rooms. So I dug around looking for a fuse box and realized I would have no choice but to go down to the desk and try to explain to Carmen that I have no power. Out comes the phrase book. "Mi habitacion tiene no poder" which I'm sure is not correct grammar, but I looked up all of the individual words and at least figured I'd get my point across. So feeling like John Cleese in the Monty Python sketch, I head down to the desk and say "no poder. tiene no poder" and get the look that the failed gubernatorial candidate, Gary Coleman, was famous for in the ever popular and yet incredibly politically incorrect 80's sitcom "Different Strokes"..."what you talking about, Willis?" So I tried again, and she understood I was trying to say "power" when I struggled to pronounce "luz" for "light". So after asking about lights in the halls and all she goes rattling off something about housekeeping tomorrow, etc, etc, and I quickly start digging for the word "flashlight". At this point she's giving me the look like I'm a crazy lady and gives up trying to understand (though I was actually quite proud we'd gotten that far with my phrasebook and a rudimentary understanding of a few words of spanish and english between the two of us. So she headed up to my room, discovered that I wasn't crazy and it was the breaker that flipped. And now I know that the breaker switches are all in a little box over the door if it ever happens again. Poder restored.

One last point to make again about food. I (pretty easily) convinced Rushi to join me for dinner last night but made him pick the restaurant and order everything. I love this arrangement. Another amazing meal. We started with slices of octopus on thin medallions of potatoes drizzled in olive oil and generously sprinkled with paprika. I never realized octopus could be so good, because it's most often a nearly inedible tire rubber consistency that you either want to spit out or give up chewing and swallow whole. And without much taste. But this was incredible. Apparently it's a specialty in Galicia, the next province over, and they tenderize it by pounding it then freezing it, then boiling it, and then lighly sauteeing it in olive oil. The result is well worth the effort and is still a little firm around the edges but rich and buttery soft in the center and soaks up the richness of the olive oil. Next we had skewers (I love food on sticks). One was mushrooms, peppers, onion, and bacon. The other was chunks of pork (I also love pig) marinated in olive oil, oregano, and enough garlic to expunge the world of vampires. The last dish was one of the best and yet simplest things I've had so far. It was little squids (baby tentacles and mantles) sauteed with caramelized onions and red and green peppers that were cooked down almost to nothing with extra flavorful blackened bits of onion. All of that was swimming in olive oil and seasoned with oregano and a generous but not ruinous amount of salt. Then across the top was a fan of thinly sliced and perfectly golden potatoes. Yum.

Lazy Sunday

The lifestyle here is starting to grow on me. It took some time to accept that nothing is open on Sundays. Pretty much nothing. Almost absolutely nothing. The few exceptions are the cafes that cater to those who don't cook for themselves which is good because people here would otherwise starve on Sunday. I just got back from the lab (also very much empty) and found that the cafes are actually full this evening of men riveted to some sort of football game. That's soccer for you yanks - the Super Bowl is going to come and go without notice in this part of the world.

I had to make an effort to go to the grocery store last night to stock up on groceries so that I'd have something to eat today. Beef stew. I'm excited - my first attempt to cook something real here. It's difficult to cook in a strange country since nothing is quite what you're used to. Like onions - they had sweet onions and green onions (scallions) so I went with the green onions. Now sort of wishing I'd gone for sweet. Or just said screw it all and got a block of yummy dried meat and more cheese.

Yesterday was super fun. Marian and her husband met me and Marta in the morning for a drive out into the countryside. We stopped first in Santilla which is a midieval village that's been preserved and turned into quite a tourist destination. Apparently the narrow cobblestone streets in the summer are thronged with foreigners, and you can see evidence of their past and future presence in the hotels and hostels and pizza and burger bars. But it's delightful in January on a misty day in the 50s. We wandered a few streets with local delectables and had coffee before progressing on to the next destination. Apparently we're going to try to make a return trip on another day because it's close, and it's the village nearest the Altamira Cave.

The second village was also midieval but different from the first in that Santilla is where the wealthier marquis lived, and it has a big old Romanesque cathedral and larger nicer houses whereas Barcena Mayor is up in the mountains and is a more rural agricultural village. The houses are all made of rock with dark wooden terraces, many of which are draped in vines and potted plants. The houses are built in multiple levels with the ground floor serving as housing for livestock. Many people have since converted their ground floors into a garage or shop or workshop, but there was a pony under one house and evidence of livestock under a couple more. The village is a historical site now so even though people still live there and carry on about "normal" agricultural lifestyles, it's in the presence of a lively tourist attraction with bed and breakfasts, restaurants, and giftshops dotted throughout the windy cobblestone streets. It's tastefully preserved, and the benefit of it being a tourist attraction is that the government supports conservation projects that keep these 600+ year old houses intact.

And what blog post would be complete without a description of the meal of the day? We dined at a little restaurant on the river that runs down through the valley along the edge of the village - El Mason Rio Argoza. Another fabulous meal. I only look at the menus to see if there is anything I recognize and memorize the treats that are ordered for me. Otherwise, I leave the selections entirely up to my hosts. Good idea all around. We started with a warm dish of eggs scrambled with wild mushrooms that was perfectly salty. Then there was a dish of sauteed slices of chorizo made from wild boar swimming in scarlet red grease, a plate of thinly sliced ham (jamon) which is a staple of just about every meal, and a platter of assorted "puddings". The puddings were interesting. A Spanish pudding, at least in this area, is a block of something between a mousse and a semi-soft cheese that's made at least partially of egg and comes in several flavors. Our platter had one made with the delightful soft blue cheese that I wrote of earlier, another of fish, a third with mushroom, and the last with crab. They were all wonderful and served with little squares of something similar to melba toast. And we Americans have no appreciation for proper bread compared to the Europeans. The bread here (most of it at least - if it's good) is super hard and crunchy on the outside but light, fluffy, and delicate on the inside. It's inspiring me to crack open my new bread book when I get back and try to master a good artisan loaf.

I'm making myself hungry with this post, so I'm going to be off to finish my stew and settle in to watch a movie before dozing off for the night. I hope everyone is well and enjoyed your weekends. Hasta luego...

Today's secret word is...

"morcilla". Extra special bonus points to whoever knows what that is without using a google search. Of course I won't know if you do, so feel free to cheat away...

It's one of those things that most people would eat and find yummy so long as they don't know what it is beforehand. There is a student in the lab, Rushi, with whom I went to dinner last weekend and again tonight (along with Marta). Marta is Spanish. Rushi is Indian. I have a lot of respect for Rushi. He's been here for 3 years and spoke not a word of Spanish before moving here. The cook in the university cafeteria is quite fond of him, and I think a part of that is because they struggled to understand each other for a long while. I see it in the way the cook makes fun of me as well. Anyway, Rushi loves "morcilla". I've had it before (my birthday two years ago in China) but not like this. This was super yum. Fried with onions. But my tummy hurts a little now. Too much fat. We started with dried meat of some sort then the morcilla with onions and a plate of pan friend green peppers followed with a firm cross between a cheesecake and a cheese flan for dessert. I'm considering bulimia as a healthy option for my time in Spain. Just kidding...

My other not-so-fun news is that the other day I left work a bit early to wander the city and ended up being followed by some random dude. He gave me an awkward sideways glance at a street corner and then I felt like he was following me. I stick out as an American here, and he spoke english so it may be that he just wanted to chat. But it was weird. So I cut up a side street and he turned as well. I turned right down another busy shopping street, and he turned also. I slowed to look at some housewares, and he paused to make a phone call. So then I dipped into the recessed entry of a shoe store where there were some other folks thinking that if I was just being paranoid I'd give him a chance to move on, but he came in to join me. AND THEN HE TOUCHED MY ARM. He wanted to know if I spoke english, where I was from, if I was alone, if I wanted to join him for a drink. I said "no", and he said "why not." In my head I screamed "uh, dude, because you're freaking creepy, you *followed me*, AND YOU TOUCHED ME!" But in reality I said "because I generally don't hang out with people I don't know". I'm fairly trusting and have struck up conversations with some pretty random people in relatively safe and comfortable circumstances. I spent a week on a motorbike with a guy in Cambodia that I'd just met two days before for goodness sake. So it was comforting to me to know that those little hairs on the back of my neck do in fact work. But no worries. The streets here are full of people, and Santander is a very safe town.

Okay, time for some TUMS and bedtime. I'm meeting Marian and Marta tomorrow morning to make up for last weekend's excursion that got canceled. I love when Marian says "excursion". It's such a quaint choice of words to begin with, and she has a delightful Spanish accent. so it sounds like there are all sorts of extra consonants in there. She developed a cold last weekend and decided the miserable cold wet weather was not a good idea, but we're on for the little village tomorrow. I'm looking forward to some history and older architecture. Much of Santander burned to the ground in the 1940s, so it's not a great place to see historic Spain...

The rain in Spain...

...does not fall mainly on the plains. And whoever said that was smoking crack. The rain in Spain falls mainly in Santander. It's apparently been raining here pretty much non-stop since September. I've landed myself in the Spanish equivalent of Seattle. So at least I can say this is quickly feeling like home. And it's lushly green and beautiful - if you can stand to be out long enough to enjoy it.

I got up this morning, got all ready for work, made coffee with my newly borrowed italian coffee pot that took some admirable gesturing, a poor attempt at my spanish, and a hail mary call to Isa to acquire from Carmen at the front desk, and was about to walk out the door when the sky exploded. That's the best I can describe the apocalyptic sound and downpour that came from the heavens. Thunder and lightening and heavy rain that I later found out also produced an inch of pea-sized hail. Folks here promise this is unusual weather for Santander, and I'm waiting for this oddity to go away. The 10 minute walk to work is all uphill which is challenging on an inch of loose ice with rivers of melt-off running down the sidewalk. It's unfortunate that the safest place to walk without slipping was in the rivers of runoff because my shoes were not so water proof. So dear, sweet Marian sat me down at a heater while one of the students from another lab ran off to fetch me a pair of Crocs from the medical students' changing room. I was impressed that he got my size right and clomped around the rest of the day in pale blue plastic slippers. But I am now the proud owner of a pair of spanish galoshes. Botas de agua - or at least that's what I'm calling them since they're my new water boots. The rest of me was quite dry with my raincoat and umbrella though the tiny cheap umbrella I brought along kept turning inside out in the gale force wind and threatened to turn me into Mary Poppins...

I also made impressive shopping trip #2 to the supermercado and managed to find everything on my list while resisting the urge to look like a crazy lady roaming up and down the aisles looking at all of the alien food items. Canned anchovies and tuna seem to be *the thing* here, so those might be on my lab list in addition to the turron that I'll be lynched if I forget. And they store milk *and* eggs at room temperature on shelves here. In celebration of my purchases, I rewarded myself with a bottle of grapefruit juice, though in hindsight I seem to have jumped the gun on that one. Turns out I bought "papel higienico" (toilet paper) instead of "toalles de papel" (paper towels) and now my dishes smell like flowers. Oops. In my defense, it's cheap toilet paper that looks like paper towel and was stacked two rolls each three across, so I thought it was three small rolls of paper towels. At least I didn't make the mistake the other way around.

I have also learned that Spanish coffee induces Parkinson's disease. So while I can usually handle an American cup o' jo and do my surgeries, not so much here. And since I'm here for my steady hands, no coffee for me until the weekends. Too bad cause the Spanish coffee and jetlag had just convinced me to give up my four month abstinence, and I may be going through the DTs all over again...

If God didn't want us to eat animals, why did he make them so tasty?

I just got back from the first of what I anticipate to be many fabulous dinners. I met up this evening with one of the graduate students in Marian's lab, his girlfriend, and her cousin who are visiting from Madrid. They're fun folks. We went to a really wonderful restaurant and gorged ourselves on an amazing spread starting with a mixed green salad with a dressing that had so much garlic that I'm glad I have no one to room with, though it was well balanced with the spicy greens and sharp vinegarette. Followed by a plate of meats so impressive that I had to take a picture - 5 cured tastinesses. Then cheese croquettes which are essentially cream and flour cooked down to a paste mixed with cheese and chilled then rolled into little balls that are rolled in finely crushed bread crumbs and lightly fried until they're gooey in the center. Then a dish of shrimp sauteed in garlic, butter, and white wine. Followed by baked potatoes stuffed with ground beef and drizzled in some sort of bechamel sauce with paprika. And the final course was a cheese plate with 7 different cheeses, many of which are special to this region. One was a delightful soft cows milk cheese that was accompanied with quince paste. I think we had the exact thing in madrid with the addition of walnuts. Another cheese was a very stinky cross between a brie and a bleu cheese Everything was so simple and yet so incredibly yummmm because of the quality. Of course this was matched with two pitchers of sangria that tasted of the faintest addition of vanilla or banana and finished off with a yummy sweet cream liqueur that was sort of similar to Bailey's but lighter and with a more delicate flavor.

So I now understand when my dad would get mad at me for saying that his cows were fat. "They're not fat, they're FULL!" he'd say. And I'd say "well they look fat to me." Right now I look pretty fat to me, and while I'm definitely just full to the brim, if I keep eating like this I will most definitely be fat before long.

But I'm walking a lot to earn it for right now at least. Marta, an MD who is doing research in the department, called last night to warn me about the high winds and bad weather and then asked if I wanted to get out today with her if the weather was nicer. It was clear from the damage to potted plants and lamp posts that the wind last night was incredible. Today it was chilly and a little windy but not bad enough to keep us in, so we went for a tour of the town. It's not a very big city, but it's long and narrow. We walked the entire length of the city to the ocean and back in about 6 hours - stopping for wine, coffee, and snacks along the way. Collectively we ran into 5 people we knew which gives me the impression that this is a very small town indeed. Two were people she knew, two were professors from the department that I'd met, another was a young student raising money for the UN refugee fund who I met a counple of nights ago. He just wanted to practice his English because I needed to have a european bank account to give him money anyway. Nice...

Speaking of money, my new favorite spanish word is "rebajas" which means "sale". Every store window has it spelled out in big letters. The slumping economy has hit spain BIG TIME. When we were here in August the dollar was $1.57 per euro, and now it's down to $1.29. Everything is up to 70% off in the stores. You know what that means, Jenna - SHOES. Lots of shoes. Lots of pretty boots. But it makes me feel a little bit guilty even though I have nothing to do with it personally. The whole world's economy is taking a *huge* hit right now, and a lot of it is tied up in the US financial system. It's easy to sit at home and think that our troubles are limited to the US, but this is an enormous crisis (and they quite bluntly call it a "crisis" here) that is hitting the global economy. And it probably affects places like this that don't have as big an economy to begin with versus us at home. So in exchange, I'm going to see what I can do to help out a little bit in the retail sector...

My other big news is that I'm making friends left and right here. Folks are super friendly. The woman who runs the desk at the apartments in the evening, Carmen, speaks very little english (about as much as I do spanish) but she tries whenever I come through. She looks sort of like the Spanish equivalent of Darren's aunt Dawn which will only make sense to the few of you who have met her. Very short hair and sort of no-nonsense looking. She's been asking about my spanish, and I've been trying desperately to answer. She says I'm only allowed to speak in spanish and my friends here shouldn't speak english with me. I don't think she realizes how isolating that would be. I met another young gal, Isa, who is living on my floor, and she speaks a little more english. We went down the elevator together speaking english, and Carmen chastised her saying she was only supposed to speak spanish with me. So now we have an agreement. If Carmen will help me learn spanish, I will teach her some more English. I feel like I have a lot of people looking out for me here, and it's quickly turned into a lot of fun.

Must turn in for now. I got the best note when I came in at 1 am tonight. Marian is calling at 11 am tomorrow. I was afraid it would be a lot earlier. She and I are taking a drive out into the countryside to see a small village in a valley. It should be breathtakingly picturesque. I will be sure to have my camera and will try to post pictures!

Welcome to my little Spanish apartment...

Oops, just realized I sent my blog announcement as a "reply to all" from my email last year when I left for China. I will be returning to China again, but that trip is scheduled for the end of March. For those of you who did not know, I will be spending the next 5 weeks working in Santander, Spain at the University of Cantabria. There is a woman here who is a fabulous embryologist, and she and I are working together on a project that will require me to do very delicate surgeries on chick embryos. Surgeries I have never attempted. Surgeries at which she is an expert. Surgeries at which I am hoping my best not to eff up :)

So after being up until 4 am the night before my flight finishing the last bits of things in lab that couldn't wait until I got back, I overcame the stark denial that I was actually temporarily moving to Spain and boarded an overnight flight to Madrid hoping to take a Tylenol PM and zonk out for the 6 hour transit. The flight attendants had other plans. Every time they came down the aisles with meals or beverages, up went the cabin lights at full candle power. So while I did have a whole row of seats to myself on a mostly empty plane (a whole row of two - don't ask why I didn't move to the center of the plane where I could have slept in more than an egg shell of space), it was less than restful.

My first lesson about spain in the winter - even though it's a lower latitude than Boston, it gets light here *way* later. I arrived in Madrid and had to go through passport control before proceeding on to the connecting flight to santander. It was pitch black outside so without checking the clock I thought perhaps it was only 6:30 am and I had loads of time to mosey on toward my 8:50 departure. The first clock I saw said 8:05! And Marian, the woman with whom I'll be working, gets into lab by shortly after 8 am every morning. I am solar powered. I don't get up easily if the sun is not up first. But somehow I will be managing to drag my corpse out of bed and into lab before the sun rises. So much for my late nights out discothequing with the Spaniards.

So I am checked into my little studio apartment in downtown Santander with a private bath and a little kitchenette. I have an under-the-counter fridge and two cook tops that should suffice to feed myself so that I don't have to depend on my abysmal (read: almost non-existent) spanish. I have already made one shopping trip to supplement the generous rations that Marian presented upon arrival, and I am in the midst of preparing my first meal in my little Spanish apartment as I type: some sort of pre-marinated pork chop with browned potatoes and a spinach salad with oil and vinegar. I'm not going to be able to do anything fancy like pot roast and cheesecake while I'm here, but I can at least take care of myself which feels liberating. And there are a ton of little specialty "alimentacion" shops in this area full of fancy meats and cheeses and jars of interesting delectables. I don't think I'm going to have a hard time eating my way through the next few weeks.

Other than that, my sweet little apartment seems to have walls made of paper. The outside noise isn't so bad, but I definitely have neighbors above and on either side, because I think I can hear them breathing. And I can hear everything else. TV, cell phone ring, slippered feet sliding across the floor above... But the nice thing about paper thin walls is that I can also hear the organ of the church next door at the evening mass. We'll just have to see how early that starts and how charming it continues to be. But for right now it's quite delightful.

I'm going to feed my addled brain and try to turn in soon so that I'm on the way toward getting circadian-adjusted. I'm going to try to update this from time to time with my misadventures of trying to survive as a non-spanish speaker living in Spain. At least Darren gave me hours and hours and hours of spanish lessons on CD before I left, so I can spend some of my spare time in the room and perhaps while I'm dissecting listening to spanish lessons so that perhaps by the time I leave in 5 weeks I can say that I speak a little spanish. At least more than the dirty words I learned from the Mexican kids in the back of the bus in grade school...

Hasta luego...

Homeward bound...

I'm packing and figured I'd stop real quick to let you know I'm headed home tonight. It's been a bit rocky the last few days. I flew from Urumqi to Beijing on Wednesday and started to feel a burning and rumbling in my digestive tract that turned into a pretty nasty bout of food poisoning. Fever of 102.5, severe headache, intestinal distress. It was no fun. But that's exactly why I travel with antibiotics, so I was able to get some crackers, a sports drink, take Cipro, and ride it out. I also have to say that I have the best doctor in the world. I emailed him to let him know I was sick and see if he thought it was bad enough to call a doctor here. At least it's Beijing, so I could have seen a trustworthy doctor, but my Doc in Boston said that I was doing everything I could and that I should feel fine in 1-2 days. He even knew that my upset stomach was because of the potassium in the sport drink, and sure enough, when I diluted it by half in water, the nausea went away. By the time I woke up yesterday the fever had broken, and I was a little tired but back to normal. I stayed in to rest which is fine since I've seen enough of Beijing on previous trips. I'm sure it was something I ate. I'm not as careful as maybe I should be, but you can be super super careful and still end up sick. I ate at a dinner theater buffet Tuesday night and had a bit of street food over the last few days, so it could have been any of that. My fellow travelers in Kashgar didn't get sick though, so I don't think it was that round of street food. Perhaps the milk tea for breakfast in Urumqi. Oh well, one can never really tell...

Anyway, I'm going to finish packing and perhaps walk around the zoo for an hour or so before I have to leave for the airport. I hope you're all well, and I'm looking forward to seeing and talking to folks when I get home. I've missed everyone. Best wishes...

Back in Kashgar

Amy and I got up early Sunday to go to the Livestock Market, which was one of the main things I wanted to visit in Kashgar. It's on the edge of the city and easy to find if you follow the truck loads of sheep, cattle, and donkeys. It's an open dusty lot that's actually quite well organized - halters, riding, and feed equipment in the front row followed by nursing cows and calves, large breed bulls, smaller breed bulls, sheep, and a few goats. The sheep are lined up flank to flank and tied off in a row of looped rope. Most of them at least - there were a few herds that were loosely corralled with a ring of rope, but those kept escaping and having to be chased down and literally tossed back into the pack. The corralled ones seemed to be awaiting a good shearing, since they were thickly wooly and were being handed off one by one to a pair of women sitting on the ground with one animal at a time an a pair of big shearing scissors. The sheep's feet were tied together, and she had her leg pressing its neck to the ground to keep it still. Back in the far corner are the donkeys and horses, and about half the length of the lot is reserved for "test riding" the horses. That was great to watch. A lot of these men are real horsemen, so watching them ride and inspect the animals was a treat.

It's a working market, so it's bustling with men (this is "men's work") wearing jackets and round Hui hats or square Ughyur hats. They all know each other and greet each other with warm handshakes, and then it's down to business. There is a lot of handling of the animals and a lot of talking, often in groups of 6-8 men, and they'd move from one animal to the other. Once in awhile the negotiations seemed to get a bit heated, and we witnessed a fight break out, but it was very peaceful for the most part. I have read that the haggling can last all day, and I believe it. In two hours, we only saw about 4-5 transactions completed. We only stood in about four places the whole morning. We'd stop and watch the men haggling over bulls for 20 minutes or so, move on to the sheep for another half hour-ish, and then back to the donkeys for a lengthy while. Amy and I both liked to really watch what was going on and not just storm through taking pictures and being obnoxious like most of the rest of the tourists. And we were much more accepted for that. Several people smiled and invited us over, but we just hovered on the periphery watching and snapping the occasional quick photo from a distance. And then there are the rest of the tourists. I'm embarrassed to be a foreigner sometimes. First there was the woman wearing short shorts and a halter top with her shoulders and half her back exposed. In a Muslim area where that's not acceptable. Then there were the large groups that plowed through the market in waves of 20 minute visits toting their e-freaking-normous zoom lenses but still insisting on getting right up in people's faces. One woman in particular didn't seem to care that she was interfering with business when she insisted on taking a photo of a group of men negotiating, even though they repeatedly tried to wave her away. Another pair of Americans (one Chinese American who spoke no Chinese) were walking around with a video camera and a translator trying to interview people for some unknown reason which seemed a little intrusive and annoying. But my favorite were the tourists wearing facemasks and frowning at the dust and smell of animals and manure. Don't go to a livestock sale if you don't like the smell of animals.

From the livestock market, we made our way over to the Sunday Bazaar which is a lot like many of the other markets in Asia only a lot bigger. It wasn't as crowded as it should have been. The street in front should have been shoulder to shoulder from one end to the other, but there was plenty of room for car traffic. I think the increased security checks probably make people feel like it isn't worth the hassle. The market itself seems to have two main sections - the local goods section with household items and local clothing and the tourist souvenir section with the overpriced furs, carpets, and trinkety things. Amy and I decided to try to blend in a little better by buying head scarves from one of the local stalls. The woman helped us tied them correctly, and we spent the rest of the day wearing them. It felt comfortable, and it opened people up to us a lot more. Where people were friendly enough or at least passively accepting, suddenly we brought smiles and surprised stares. One man even walked right up to Amy and stuck his face 6 inches from hers to stare in the front of the scarf at her face. A few others almost stepped out in traffic or ran into things trying to get a look at us. But they all seemed pleased that we were making the effort to integrate.

So then we walked down the row of stalls purveying dried fruit and nuts and stopped to chat with a young man in his 20s who looked smiley and friendly. The whole conversation was in Chinese with Amy, but she summarized a translation for me later. The guy had asked where we were from, and she said "America" to which he replied "I hate Americans." Great, I thought. It's not the first time I've heard that one. He said he hates the American government and American people because we support our government. Amy corrected him to say that the American government and the American people are separate, and that a lot of Americans (including us) do not support our government. He was genuinely smiling and friendly but was also completely frank and honest with us, and he told us that he had no issues with us - that we were friends and guests, and he didn't hate us. Comforting. I can understand why there is anti-American sentiment in this part of the world. Our country hasn't exactly done a great job of engendering good relationships with the Muslim world. I'm just glad that individual people can have the open mind and kind hearts to judge each person as an individual and not lump us all together in one big hated category.

Lunch was at the outdoor food market. We ate a sampling of all sorts of street food that was yummy. I had cold rice noodles with shredded cucumber and cabbage and some sort of spicey sauce and a couple of fried yummies. One in particular was addictive. It was a fried loose pastry thing that came out of the oil looking sort of like a bird's nest, and it was stuffed with sugar, raisins, and almonds. Oh my goodness yummy. Another of my favorite Ughyur foods is samsa. It's a rolled out dough pastry pocket stuffed with lamb meat and fat, spices, and onion, and then it's stuck to the inside of a brick kiln to bake. Yakupjan says that the bricks are made from the salty clay in this area, so as the samsa cooks and crisps, the dough absorbs some of that salty goodness. Awesome. The weirdest thing I've tried is sheep lung. Yep, that's right. Lung. I only took a bit. One of the gals had a big bowl of broth with chunks of sheep lung and slices of a sausage-looking thing that was flavored rice-stuffed intestine. I knew it was lung, and she asked if I wanted to try it. Why not? It didn't taste like much, and I successfully convinced that gag part of my brain that it was a hunk of fat. Not sure why that's psychologically so much better.

From the market, we wandered through the old part of the city to the top of the hill with the big mosque. The city is so active and alive, so that was a nice walk. The mosque itself is yellow tiled and surrounded by a big square. It's really beautiful, and we got there in time to hear the call to prayer. I sat in a spot by myself on the steps to listen to the low somber chants and watch the men stream like ants through the doors. Ughyur women do not enter the mosque, and while foreign women are allowed when there are no prayers in session, I didn't feel it was appropriate. I did speak with a German man who entered and took some pictures, and it seems very nice. The entrance is very plain without a lot of ostentatious decoration, and the prayer area is centered around a big wooded garden. It looked so peaceful in the pictures. There is a covered walkway circling the perimeter that is carpeted with prayer rugs, and this is where the men go for their prayers. So natural and beautiful.

Then to break that natural beauty, Amy and I had to go and get ourselves hit on. We were walking to the bank when a man walked up to us, all smiles and with very broken English. He was from Tajikistan and was a truck driver vacationing in Kashgar. He asked where we were from, unsuccessfully asked for Amy's phone number, and then made a gesture of "you, you, sleep". Pointing at each of us and trying to get us to come back to his place. Uhhh, no. He wasn't creepy and walked away politely and quickly when we said absolutely not, but it is indicative of the opinion of American women. This isn't the first person I've come across who has watched the movies and seen scantily clad Americans with their loose morals and thinks we're all easy. Sorry to disappoint you, but these Americans are not into the girl on girl on Tajik. Even with that spectacular full set of gold uppers.

That is one strange thing about Kashgar - there are a half dozen dentists on every corner. I asked Yakupjan, and he said that gold teeth are a sign of wealth. There are a lot of folks walking around with fully coated (or replaced) gold teeth, and it's quite impressive. I got a few pictures of some spectacular dentist signs as keepsakes.

The Olympic torch relay is in Kashgar tomorrow (Wednesday), so I'm glad I got the heck out of dodge when I did. The streets are lined with Chinese and Olympics flags, the car antennae are all sporting mini flags, there are banners plastering the railings of the sidewalk, and the security precautions are impressive. Though no information seems to be accurate or forthcoming. Yesterday, when I returned to Urumqi, I was told that the torch would be here today and that the streets would be blocked to cars from 8 pm last night until 2 pm today. I was also told that the campus would be closed so that if you left you couldn't come back in, and that I could watch what's going on from my hotel room but couldn't open the window. None of this ended up being true. Certain streets were closed in the center of the city where the route led, and the gates of the university were closed, but they were still letting people in and out. The shops were all open, and it wasn't on lock down, but there seems to be a lot of concern and paranoia around here. Maybe warranted, maybe not. But I heard all of the same precautions about Kashgar, and I feel like those might actually be more accurate. I'm fleeing the torch though and heading back to Beijing tomorrow. Then I'll have one full day in Beijing, and it's back to Boston on Friday. Looking forward to being home!

Yak Attack

We got up and out the door Friday morning for the four hour drive to Karakul Lake in the mist, smog, and low clouds. It wasn't great weather for appreciating the scenery, but it at least kept the sun from beating down so hard. I still managed to get a significant amount of color, though thankfully I'm not the familiar shade of "Cooper Red" - more of a dusted rosey beige. It’s in a fabulous farmer tan pattern. And somehow my big American schnoz is a shade darker than the rest of my face.

The landscape from Kashgar starts as flat plains of small to midsized rocks and rises through sandy plateaus and low hills to iron-rich red mountains to a ring of dark mountains dusted with white sand dunes surrounding a shallow lake and culminates in the dramatic glacial peaks of the Pamir Mountains. The Karakorum Highway connects China with Pakistan over the highest mountain pass in the world, and while we were stopped at the side of the road perusing billiards tables spread with geological treasures and taking in the majestic scenery, we were passed by a convoy of about six trucks from Pakistan all draped with green canvas signs that read “Relief Assistance”. It was really a moving sight. I think particularly because the Western media gives a somewhat mistrustful portrayal of China and often presents a decidedly negative image of Pakistan. It was a small glimpse of a humanitarian gesture of assistance that just made me smile and feel happy with the world for a while.

We arrived at Karakul in the early afternoon, were shown to our yurt, and collapsed into a high altitude-induced coma for an hour or more of recovery. The lake is at about 3000 meters, and you really do feel it. Walking 100 meters takes the wind out of your sails and makes your heart beat quickly, and I developed a pretty raging headache – probably partly because of my sinus issues from a few days prior. The yurt was awesome. And I just love the word yurt. Yurt yurt yurt. Ours was a more traditional yurt than the modern concrete structures and was shaped as a rounded tent with molded bare tree branches as the frame draped in camel hair felt. The door is covered by a flap of felted camel hair to block out the cold, and the roof has an opening for the stove pipe. It was really quite cozy, even into the bitterly cold and windy night, and we had a nice fire in our little stove fueled with dried yak poop. The smokey dung fragrance provided some authentic ambience to the experience. It was actually a remarkably good sleep considering there were five of us together on the floor of a yurt not meant to sleep five. I kept singing in my head “5 little Indians sleeping in a bed. One falls out and the little one says, Roll over. Roll over.” Fortunately when you’re already on the ground, there’s no way to fall out of bed.

Some of you have previously noticed my obsession with “the toilet situation”. This is a very common topic of conversation in this part of the world, and any backpacker will ask another when returning from the toilet “How was it?” Chinese toilets are generally ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 based on whether it’s a squatter or Western, whether there are actual stalls or if it’s communal, the amount and type of bodily excretions visible, the smell, the presence of a sink, soap, and a hand drying device. The vast majority of toilets rank below a 5 - smelly squatter coated with nasties and no place to wash you hands. Therefore most foreigners are thankful that a squatter means they don’t have to touch anything and keep a “toilet pocket” well-stocked with tissues and hand sanitizer. The one at our yurt site was about a 1.5 on the Chinese toilet scale. In Amy’s eloquent choice of words, it was literally a “brick shit house” – past the three grazing camels and on the left. This is common for rural toilets – a small brick structure divided into the men’s side, and the women’s side slightly elevated above the pile of waste with two “stalls” each (a 2 1/5 foot wall dividing but no door). You squat over a slit cut in the floor and do your business. Right over everyone else’s business and usually a swarm of flies. So instead we opted for the great out doors. But there are no trees or shrubbery in these mountains, so we stood guard over each other behind the biggest rocks we could find. You lose any sense of shame pretty quickly in this place.

Our hosts were a Kyrgyz family who live in the yurt cluster during the summers and have a winter house over the mountains. They were a warm and welcoming family, and it helped that my fellow travelers speak Chinese so that we could have a real conversation. The family is held together by the matriarch – her husband passed away years ago. She has three sons and two daughters, and the middle son runs the tourism business. He was a cute and smiley young twenty-year old who seemed to love the company of foreigners and was eagerly attentive to our every need. The mother was a very kind and quiet woman, a little plump with a round face and deep-set eyes. She makes camel hair Kyrgyz carpets by hand, and they were the most beautiful rugs of their kind that we’d seen on this trip. The colors were vibrant, and she takes great care in her work. So three of us each bought a small rug. It’ll be a nice keepsake from the experience, and I’m going to pretend that mine was made of the hair of my own personal camel, since it has not been proven otherwise.

Speaking of my own personal camel – we got to ride camels around the lake! Camels are awesome. They’re so expressive and funny. If llamas are sarcastic (as I hear they are), then camels are sly. It’s the eyelashes that give them that coy look that they’re up to something – like eyeboogering your knee when you least expect it. Amy’s camel must have developed an itch that could only be cured by a vigorous rubbing of eye snot and camel hair. Lovely. We didn’t have to drive our own camels – four of the guys went with us, and they took turns leading and tying groups of camels off to each other in a caravan. At one point our friend Jonathan was in the lead of our caravan, and we were joking that he was leading his harem of wives to our new home. There is a remarkable amount of camel innuendo what with the humps and camel toes and all.

The next morning we awoke to join the family for “bagels” (circular nan with a hole in the middle that looks and tastes remarkably bagel-like) and salted yak milk tea. Yaks are such useful animals. The yak milk made the tea nice and creamy, and the salt helped combat the effects of the altitude and dry air. From the lake, we drove further south into the mountains to Tashgarukan. That leg of the trip was only marginally worth it. The famous site is an old stone fortress that supposedly marks the mid point on the old Silk Road between Europe and China. There’s not much more than a pile of rubble left, but it was cool standing at a site that has been around since something something BC. My favorite part was the grasslands to the east of the city. The river coming down from the mountain glaciers opens up into the Tashkarugan Oasis that is a sprawling field of emerald grass at the base of the mountains, dotted with livestock herds and white yurts. Standing on the edge of the grassland, you hear the giggle of children, people shouting at their animals, and the low rhythm of drum beats. The grassland itself is kind of boggy, and we each took turns carefully staggering over carpets of thickly woven patches of grass suspended over water that truly felt like stumbling across a waterbed. Fortunately no one fell through. It was great fun, but I would really hate to know what the water underneath looks and smells like, and I'm not sure how deep it could have been.

While the vast majority of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang are Ughyur, there are pockets of other groups like the Kyrgyz family we stayed with, the Kazakh family across the lake, and the Tajiks in Tashgarukan. On the way back, we stopped at the home of a Tajik family – just for a short visit. We all felt a little weird invading their space until we realized the driver knew them, and they were thrilled to have us there. There was an older woman with her two daughters, a teenage grandson, and a younger granddaughter. They made us take lots and lots of pictures and kept squeezing our hands and touching our elbows. They seemed just as interested in us as we were in them, and it was a nice moment of sharing without the ruining tourist experience of someone demanding money. My travel buddies are going to try to get prints of some of the pictures in Kashgar and send them back with the driver the next time he passes by their house. They had a large collage of various family photos on the wall, so I think they’ll like to have copies of our pictures. I thought they were beautiful people. A lot of the Tajiks have very different features from the other minorities since they're Persian rather than Turkish – very sharp angular noses and jawlines with narrow and long faces. It’s kind of fun trying to figure out what ethnicity different folks are, but there’s a lot of gray where features run together in the middle.

Security in Xinjiang is definitely higher than anywhere else I’ve traveled, and we had to pass through two police checkpoints on the way up and the same two plus two more on the way back to Kashgar. We returned on Saturday, so I guess the heightened security was because of the increased number of people flooding into Kashgar for the Sunday market. The two permanent checkpoints required us to get out of the car and present our passports for inspection, and they recorded our information. No big deal except that the last one on the way up had a machine gun nest perched on the top of a building. Empty, but still not so comforting. Whatever. On the way back, we stopped at the third checkpoint, and four officers surrounded us wanting to inspect our bags. They nosed around inside, and I just didn’t so much like the idea of some strange guy poking around my belongings with all of my valuables. I’d packed a clean change of clothes in my small day bag, but we didn’t get a chance to clean up or change, so they were still in there, and my undies were on top. So when the guy came to me, I politely unzipped my bag and pulled out the undies. The guy just said “Okay, okay” and walked away. No bag search for me ☺

But the absolute best police checkpoint ever in the history of the world was the last one leading into Kashgar. Same story as the one before – the van stopped at the lowered gate, and we were surrounded by police officers wanting passports and wanting to search our bags again. This time we rolled up next to two donkey carts pulling piles of neatly stacked onions. As the officers asked us to get out of the van, the second donkey suddenly mounted the onion cart in front of him. At first we thought he was trying to eat the onions until we realized that he was having a lustful moment with the voluptuous pile of produce. We all started laughing so hard my eyes were tearing. The officers turned around to look at the ruckus behind them, were absolutely mortified, and before we knew it the gate was raised and we were on our way into Kashgar. Thank you, donkey!  Now I wonder who actually ended up buying those onions...

Happy happy Kashgar

I have arrived safely, and of course within 15 minutes of landing met 3 other Americans and a Belgian, 2 Singaporeans, and a Malaysian who all speak English. I've been adopted by the American-Belgian "gang" which rocks since a) they're a lot of fun, and b) they all speak fluent Chinese since they just spent a year studying in China. One would think the latter would be uber helpful, given we're still technically "in" China, but there are surprising few people in Kashgar who actually speak Chinese. The local language is Ughyur. There are a crazy number of Americans here. Americans don't generally travel, but 6 of the 10 foreigners I've met on this whole trip have been American. And I'm the only one who doesn't speak Chinese. How can I feel so uncultured amongst my own generally uncultured countrymen? These guys are giving way too good of an impression of Americans. Folks are going to start thinking we're all worldly and culturally sensitive or something...

Kashgar is a fantastic city. It was swelteringly hot this afternoon, so we spent a good while hanging out in a coffee shop, but we did visit the largest mosque in China - from the outside only since we weren't sure if prayers were in session. Foreigners aren't allowed in the mosque when prayers are in session. It's a big concession to allow us in at all, since even Ughyur women are not allowed to visit mosque - only men. Apparently during prayers, the women all wait outside. They're supposed to pray at home. The clothing is very Central Asian. The men are mostly walking around with long beards, but no chops - kind of like the Amish beard but with a mustache. They wear the long shirts and loose pants that you see a lot of Pakistanis wear on television and rounded edge square small hats. The women are mostly in long skirts, long sleeves, and head scarves, some with only the eyes showing, and a few with something that looks like a coarsely woven, slightly intricate brown towel completely covering their hair and face. One woman who followed us closely for a few blocks this afternoon pulled her face covering aside a couple of times for just a brief second, and her face was ashen pale. As in a little bluish gray. I'm not sure if she had whitening makeup on, or if her face has truly rarely seen the light of day, but it was really breathtaking. Again, only for the briefest of seconds, and I tried not to look directly at her so she wouldn't get startled.

The women with only the eyes showing are captivating. The eye color here ranges from glacial lake blue to jade green to chocolate brown, and there is something about only seeing a pair of strikingly beautiful eyes that is stunning. I don't think I totally agree with people saying that scarves are repressive. I think it's alluring to see only the most expressive and beautiful part of a person's face - if the covering is elective and the absence thereof doesn't mean punishment including death. Of course it's difficult to tell facial expressions and mood from just the eyes, so I sometimes don't know how we're being received by the locals. Never with any animosity, but the emotion seems to range from curiosity to mild nervousness to warm welcome.

The kids are the best, but then the kids are the best everywhere. They follow us through the streets saying "hello hello" and something in Ughyur that rhymes with "hello" and ends with something sounding like "jello" in a sing-song sort of voice. Must remember to ask Yakupjan what they're saying, because it seems widespread amongst the school kids. And they all love having their picture taken and crowding around to see the screen. The cutest has been this little boy of about six with fire engine red hair missing his two front teeth. He gave me his blackened grimy hand to shake (how could I resist?) and posed for a handful of toothless photos before running off into an alley. Speaking of teeth - do not ever visit a dentist in Kashgar. I'll leave it at that.

What else - donkey carts selling melons and turnips, mud and straw coated brick square homes for blocks and blocks with narrow twisting alleyways, beautiful and enormous Chinese/Central Asian architectural doors with large round door pulls, open doorways leading to courtyards with terraces of grapevines providing shade (and seasonal treats), a huge and intricately carved teak doorway leading into a home housing a pidgeon colony in the rafters (intentionally), Ughyur nan (bread) in the shape of bagels and tasting better than a bagel, street stalls of men getting shaved and bicycles being repaired, and people everywhere. Can you tell I like the doorways? I'm taking a lot of pictures of doors and architectural details.

National identity

I was just leaving the hotel for the lab when I ran into two folks (brother and sister) from Camaroon. I've gotten in the habit of smiling warmly at people who are obviously not from around here, since there aren't so many of them to be seen. So they stopped to chat for a bit. The guy what convinced he'd met me before, but I think it was just an easy ploy to engage me in some idle chit chat for awhile. He asked if I was at the Pepsi commercial. That made me laugh, because I'd just heard about this commercial from Eric - one of the two Americans I met up with last night. It was apparently filmed here a few months ago, and it sounds like the scraped together every ethnic looking person they could get their hands on to create the imagery. Here a description of the commercial, roughly in his words, which I swear sounded just like he was a marketing exec trying to sell the commerical idea to the company...

Imagine a giant stadium, supposedly evoking the spirit of the Olympic games (even though it's a 48 hour train ride from Beijing to the edge of Urumqi). The stadium is full of avid fans of many nationalities cheering their athletes to victory. You have the scantily clad Brazilian women (who were originally supposed to be cast with Ughyur women until the film crew realized that perhaps putting a Muslim woman in a bikini was a *tiny* bit of an issue), the Germans wearing Viking helmets and playing tubas (uh, what?), the Africans playing an assortment of hand drums (this must have been where the guy from Camaroon was cast), the Americans - girls dressed in cheerleader outfits and guys in London polo shirts (again, what?) and sideways baseball caps, and the Han Chinese. Everyone is cheering wildly in their "traditional" dress and custom except for the Chinese who all seem a little lost with no identity. Until suddenly, a Chinese man from high in the rafters looks across the stadium to see his countrymen unable to appropriately cheer for their team. He looks at his bottle of Pepsi, twists the cap, takes a long drink, and leaps off his perch in the nosebleed section, aided by guidewires in a very Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon prolonged and unrealistic flying acrobatic way. He touches off the heads of a German and a Japanese until finally landing gently on the grass of the stadium. Suddenly Pepsi for all of his Chinese compatriots, and they finally have their national identity and enthusiasm to adequately compete with the masses! Hooray for corporate capitalism!

The conversation last night with Eric and Nolan was delightful. Eric is a PhD student at Indiana University in Eurasian studies, and he's here for a year studying Ughyur language, linguistics, and the relationship between minority languages and cultural identity. Nolan has his masters in English education and is finishing a two year sting in Urumqi working as a contractor for the US State Department in their language exchange program. They both had lots of stories to tell about living and working in China, and you can tell that they love Xinjiang, hate the journalistic inaccuracies of how this place is portrayed, and long for the province to maintain its ethnic flair without being too over-run by Han Chinese settlers. From what little I've seen, I think that's going to be a challenge. But that's for another blog post or a personal discussion over beers sometime. I've learned a lot from being here...

The bar we went to is a neat place. It felt like home. I even had a hot toddy upon arrival, which felt really nice to my poor sick throat. The bar is a homey and comfortable place - a grouping of couches at the front with a couple of high def TVs that featured the Russia vs. Spain soccer match. It was well attended late into the night by the local Russians and who I think were possibly Kasakhs cheering for Spain - likely just to rile the Russians. The walls are panneled with oversized bamboo-esque tiles aged with a gold tint, and there are tasteful faux ivory beaded curtains draping the doorways. It's appropriately dimly lit for a nice bar and has a great atmosphere - until the cigarette smokers increase in number, and my sinuses scream for clean air.

One of the owners and the manager were there, and we chatted for a bit about life in China. Sounds frustrating. They're swell enough guys, but they still do everything "the Western way". Even while I was sitting there, they lost their temper a few times with their staff over the placement of plants on the patio and the fact that the tables weren't getting the appropriate condiments for each meal. One of the Chinese gals leaned over and said "he has a very bad temper" about the guy from London. I made a brief cultural observation about the difference between Westerners (emotional) and Chinese (reserved). That turned into a very interesting conversation. She was a sweet gal. The Chinese may not be direct about many things, but they are very direct about personal observations. Such as "You are very beautiful, and you smile alot. But if you smile too much, you will get too many wrinkles". I had a really good laugh at that one :)

I am off to Kashgar at the ass crack of dawn tomorrow morning. I waited until a little late to book my flight, and the only available seats were at 8:35 am. Blech. So I was going to catch a cab until one of our senior colleagues insisted on arranging a hired car from the university motor pool to pick me up at 7 am and take me to the airport. Not necessary, but okay - very nice gesture. But *then* another colleague insisted that poor Yakupjan wake up and meet me to escort me to the airport and make sure I get checked in and off okay. I told him he didn't have to do it, but with a very long face he said "no, I have to or I'll get in trouble." I think I forgot to mention that I'm flying solo on this little excursion.  I wanted Yakupjan to accompany me, in part so that I would have an authentic experience with a local companion but also because he's become quite a good friend.  Unfortunately he just finished his bachelors and has to stay behind to finish collecting the plethora of bureaucratic red stamps that will make his graduation official. I'm having to make up a teensy white lie to ease my colleagues minds by telling them that I have a car arranged to pick me up in Kashgar and have booked a tour service for my sightseeing. That's partly true, except that I'm taking a recommended shuttle bus from the airport to my hotel and will be hiring a car and guide for an overnight trip to Karakul Lake. Oh well, they won't be there to watch over me, so what they don't know won't annoy me ;)

A final note on time zones.  I'm used to doing the mental math when calling folks between time zones back home, but this is ridiculous.  The People's Republic officially functions under one time zone for the entire country - from the vast expanse of east to west.  But Xinjiang, being an autonomous region, also functions on its own time zone - 2 hours behind Beijing time.  It makes sense since we're so far west, and it means that the sun rises and set at times that feel more reasonable.  The problem is that the hotel, the airlines, and several of our Han Chinese colleagues function on Beijing time while local offices and the Ughyurs adhere to Xinjiang time.  This has been the source of some confusion between me and Yakupjan when he tells me "we'll meet in the lab at 4" when he really means 6 (Beijing time - that's what my watch is set to so that I don't accidentally miss any flights!) but that means that I just ended up sitting around the lab for an hour wondering where everyone was until I realized my mistake.  Whoops!  Hopefully the hired car shows up in the appropriate time zone tomorrow morning...

More from Kashgar...

Green Monster Slime

No, that's not a new feature of the Boston Red Sox mascot.  That's what happened in my sinuses last night.  I seriously could have remade the star of "The Blob" with what came up, down, and out.  I woke up yesterday with a really sore throat, swollen glands, and the inability to swallow without some pretty intense pain.  Figured it was because I was a bit stupid and ate chocolate right before bed the night before.  But no. I went down to the hotel desk to the ladies who speak a little bit of english and asked them to write something in Chinese that I could take across the street to the pharmacy to get for my throat.  Good move - the pharmacist spoke no English at all.  We had a delightfully entertaining exchange of gestures where we managed to communicate that it was all in my throat, not in my nose, and she gave me a box of mysterious green packets that I was supposed to mix in hot water and drink 2-3 times per day.  It's amazing how much you can communicate through pantomiming, and it's hilarious that we all insist on talking anyway, even though we know the other can't understand.  I think part of it is just the feeling that somehow you're getting your point across anyway - inflection or something.  Or it's just being used to having to speak to be understood.

The stuff ended up looking like bee pollen and tasting like honey with cloves and camomile, so that was nice.  Not sure it did much.  While I was out with my pals, I procured a bag of salt.  So late last night, I boiled some water, let it cool, mixed in some salt, and did my favorite thing in the world when I've got a sinus issue - nasal rinse!!!  Some of you have heard me rave about this.  Well, let me tell you that I wish I'd taken pictures of what came out of my head and throat.  That could make medical history.  I was impressed.  It ranked right up there with the green nasties that came out of my head after my first trip to China.  Yes, this is my third time in China and my third sinus/respiratory issue.  What is *with* this country?!?!  And the air in Xinjiang is quite nice, so I can't even blame the pollution.  But I can't seem to come here without being colonized.

Yesterday was the belated birthday celebration with Yakupjan and Meripet.  When we were last together, we discovered that our birthdays are all in May, so we agreed to get together again upon my return.  It was a nice evening - we just walked around for a long time, wandered up to the downtown area, and then ended up at a really nice Ughyur restaurant.  I'm bummed that I wasn't able to eat - stomach too sour and too wiped from over-walking.  We spent a little bit of time carpet shopping.  This is an excellent place for purchasing rugs, so I thought I might pick one up for our living room.  They've got some really good quality, tightly woven (read - the cats will have a harder time destroying it), wool rugs - machine made in Turkey - for about $150 for 5X7.  And that's before bargaining.  It's not like one of those cool "you could only buy it traveling" rugs that is hand woven by a villager somewhere.  I asked about those - they range from $1000 - $3000, too rich for my tastes, but they're *beautiful*. But even the machined rugs of this size and quality would be about $400 in the US.  So we'll see.  I could lug it home on the plane - it doesn't weight that much.  And our living room floor is pretty bare and cold right now.  

I'm about to run out the door to meet a couple of Yanks that I met in an ice cream shop yesterday.  They're both PhD students in Eurasian culture and live in Urumqi.  It's funny how easy it is to pick out an American - no matter where you are.  Even before I heard them speak, there's a certain body posture that screams "American".  One of them was sitting slouched back in his chair with his arm dangling over the back, and at that moment I realized I was doing the same.  So I'd read online about this bar in town that's owned by an Irishman, a Kiwi, and a Japanese guy, and it's supposed to be a great expat/backpacker hangout.  I'm meeting them there in about an hour.  I'd kill for a slice of pizza and a good beer at this point.  They've got *real* imported beers.  Not the Chinese "near beer" stuff that has formaldehyde in it (no joke) and tastes like assed Budweiser. A real beer than I can enjoy the taste of while sipping at a reasonable pace without having to "show my happiness" by slamming the whole glass.  And a beer in a pint glass instead of a little juice glass. Marvelous.  I haven't seen a pint glass (or a fork!) since I left home. And it'll be nice to hang out with my fellow countrymen for awhile.  One of them just got back from a visit to Kashgar, so I can get some travel advice, speak English at a normal pace and talk about topics where we have some common ground.  I love travel and meeting new people from unfamiliar places, but after nearly 6 weeks here (and these are the first Westerners I've seen in more than a month), it'll be refreshing to have a little bit of home.  Then it's off to a *real* cultural experience in Kashgar!  I got "approval" from one of the senior professors who said it's no problem for me to go to Kashgar, so I'm planning to leave on Thursday for the weekend.  I'll stay in touch!

Ode to the razor blade

I had a hilarious email exchange with my dear friend Professor Jenkins the other day about "things not to forget when packing for field work".  It's a little more important for him, since he heads off to the Artic where forgetting something means death or at the very least going without for as long as you're there.  There's no "I'm just going to run to the store three freaking thousand miles away for a bar of Speedstick" happening up there.  I always forget something.  It's probably because I tend to make a pile on my living room floor for about a day before I leave and then pack it all the morning of.  That said, I'm quite well prepared - pocket knife, headlamp, sewing kit, basic medicines, first aid kit, sunscreen, bug spray, etc etc etc etc.  But this year I forgot to bring a razor.  And the boys here are shy about "women things" - apparently a razor is in that category.  Weeks ago, I mentioned needing to get a razor to one of the guys, and he got very very embarrassed and said "you don't need to shave.  "Uh, dude, you're Chinese.  I've got hairier legs that you do."  So I went without.  No offense to my French friends out there - love you guys, but I was starting to feel a bit like one of you.  So needless to say, I'm quite thrilled right now. We are back in Urumqi, and the first thing I did with my new found freedom and independence was going out and buy myself a razor. After 5 weeks of feeling like the newly planted clear cut hills of western Washington, my legs are once again seeing the light of day.  Hallelujah.  

  Note added in proof:  In reading about the history of the razor blade, I just learned that the modern disposable blade safety razor was invented in the US in 1901 by King Camp Gillette and William Nickerson.  I guess it's obvious why the second guy's name didn't stick in marketing.

  I'm sitting her writing this listening to the wedding processions out my window.  Xinjiang University is right in the heart of the Ughyur neighborhood, and it's Saturday evening - lots of wedding parties.  Weddings here seem like such cool affairs.  After the ceremony and dinner, the whole gang piles into their cars and heads down the road behind a cart with musicians playing traditional horns and drums, and stringed instruments.  It's hecka cool.  But I hear that Urumqi isn't even the most culturally interesting city in Xinjiang, so I am on a quest to travel south to Kashgar.  Since our work ended early, and I've got almost two weeks before I fly back to Boston, I thought I might try to spend next weekend doing something fun and exciting that I'll never get another chance to do.  Kashgar is supposed to be a far more international city than Urumqi with the largest international bazaar in all of Asia that touts the wares of folks from all over central Asia who still come to China as a big trading center.  So my Ughyur friend, Yakupjan, and I are potentially going to hop on a train or airplane south to Kashgar sometime mid week.   The train versus plane decision will be based on whether I want to spend about $300 on two roundtrip plane tickets (since I'll cover his travel as well) versus $60 and about 24 hours on the train.  I'm thinking of forking out the cash. This is probably the only place in the world where I can truly experience the Middle Eastern/Central Asian cultures without fear for my own personal safety.  And with the added benefit of local companionship.  It is really nice to experience these cultures through the guardianship of someone *of* the culture.  I visited the Minority Folk Museum and Xinjiang University when I first arrived in Urumqi, and learning about culture like that at a museum or with a tour guide not of the community feels a little condescendingly voyeuristic. 

  

It's a good morning...

There's nothing I can say that's better than this.  It's a glorious thing to wake up to on the other side of the world.  Read the whole thing.  Come back to it if you don't have time now.  It's worth it.  No matter what side of the aisle you lean toward, everyone must admit this is a moment *all* Americans should be proud of. This is truly an historical day.

P.S.  If you'd like to donate to the campaign, I'm making it easy for you.

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama

Tues., June 3, 2008 19:02:11 ET

Tonight, after fifty-four hard-fought contests, our primary season has finally come to an end.

Sixteen months have passed since we first stood together on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois. Thousands of miles have been traveled. Millions of voices have been heard. And because of what you said -- because you decided that change must come to Washington; because you believed that this year must be different than all the rest; because you chose to listen not to your doubts or your fears but to your greatest hopes and highest aspirations, tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another -- a journey that will bring a new and better day to America. Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

I want to thank every American who stood with us over the course of this campaign -- through the good days and the bad; from the snows of Cedar Rapids to the sunshine of Sioux Falls. And tonight I also want to thank the men and woman who took this journey with me as fellow candidates for President.

At this defining moment for our nation, we should be proud that our party put forth one of the most talented, qualified field of individuals ever to run for this office. I have not just competed with them as rivals, I have learned from them as friends, as public servants, and as patriots who love America and are willing to work tirelessly to make this country better. They are leaders of this party, and leaders that America will turn to for years to come.

That is particularly true for the candidate who has traveled further on this journey than anyone else. Senator Hillary Clinton has made history in this campaign not just because she's a woman who has done what no woman has done before, but because she's a leader who inspires millions of Americans with her strength, her courage, and her commitment to the causes that brought us here tonight.

We've certainly had our differences over the last sixteen months. But as someone who's shared a stage with her many times, I can tell you that what gets Hillary Clinton up in the morning -- even in the face of tough odds -- is exactly what sent her and Bill Clinton to sign up for their first campaign in Texas all those years ago; what sent her to work at the Children's Defense Fund and made her fight for health care as First Lady; what led her to the United States Senate and fueled her barrier-breaking campaign for the presidency -- an unyielding desire to improve the lives of ordinary Americans, no matter how difficult the fight may be. And you can rest assured that when we finally win the battle for universal health care in this country, she will be central to that victory. When we transform our energy policy and lift our children out of poverty, it will be because she worked to help make it happen. Our party and our country are better off because of her, and I am a better candidate for having had the honor to compete with Hillary Rodham Clinton.

There are those who say that this primary has somehow left us weaker and more divided. Well I say that because of this primary, there are millions of Americans who have cast their ballot for the very first time. There are Independents and Republicans who understand that this election isn't just about the party in charge of Washington, it's about the need to change Washington.Ê There are young people, and African-Americans, and Latinos, and women of all ages who have voted in numbers that have broken records and inspired a nation.

All of you chose to support a candidate you believe in deeply. But at the end of the day, we aren't the reason you came out and waited in lines that stretched block after block to make your voice heard. You didn't do that because of me or Senator Clinton or anyone else. You did it because you know in your hearts that at this moment -- a moment that will define a generation -- we cannot afford to keep doing what we've been doing. We owe our children a better future. We owe our country a better future. And for all those who dream of that future tonight, I say -- let us begin the work together. Let us unite in common effort to chart a new course for America.

In just a few short months, the Republican Party will arrive in St. Paul with a very different agenda. They will come here to nominate John McCain, a man who has served this country heroically. I honor that service, and I respect his many accomplishments, even if he chooses to deny mine. My differences with him are not personal; they are with the policies he has proposed in this campaign.

Because while John McCain can legitimately tout moments of independence from his party in the past, such independence has not been the hallmark of his presidential campaign.

It's not change when John McCain decided to stand with George Bush ninety-five percent of the time, as he did in the Senate last year.

It's not change when he offers four more years of Bush economic policies that have failed to create well-paying jobs, or insure our workers, or help Americans afford the skyrocketing cost of college -- policies that have lowered the real incomes of the average American family, widened the gap between Wall Street and Main Street, and left our children with a mountain of debt.

And it's not change when he promises to continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians -- a policy where all we look for are reasons to stay in Iraq, while we spend billions of dollars a month on a war that isn't making the American people any safer.

So I'll say this -- there are many words to describe John McCain's attempt to pass off his embrace of George Bush's policies as bipartisan and new. But change is not one of them.

Change is a foreign policy that doesn't begin and end with a war that should've never been authorized and never been waged. I won't stand here and pretend that there are many good options left in Iraq, but what's not an option is leaving our troops in that country for the next hundred years -- especially at a time when our military is overstretched, our nation is isolated, and nearly every other threat to America is being ignored.

We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in - but start leaving we must. It's time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future. It's time to rebuild our military and give our veterans the care they need and the benefits they deserve when they come home. It's time to refocus our efforts on al Qaeda's leadership and Afghanistan, and rally the world against the common threats of the 21st century -- terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. That's what change is.

Change is realizing that meeting today's threats requires not just our firepower, but the power of our diplomacy -- tough, direct diplomacy where the President of the United States isn't afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands and what we stand for. We must once again have the courage and conviction to lead the free world. That is the legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and Kennedy. That's what the American people want. That's what change is.

Change is building an economy that rewards not just wealth, but the work and workers who created it. It's understanding that the struggles facing working families can't be solved by spending billions of dollars on more tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs, but by giving a the middle-class a tax break, and investing in our crumbling infrastructure, and transforming how we use energy, and improving our schools, and renewing our commitment to science and innovation. It's understanding that fiscal responsibility and shared prosperity can go hand-in-hand, as they did when Bill Clinton was President.

John McCain has spent a lot of time talking about trips to Iraq in the last few weeks, but maybe if he spent some time taking trips to the cities and towns that have been hardest hit by this economy -- cities in Michigan, and Ohio, and right here in Minnesota -- he'd understand the kind of change that people are looking for.

Maybe if he went to Iowa and met the student who works the night shift after a full day of class and still can't pay the medical bills for a sister who's ill, he'd understand that she can't afford four more years of a health care plan that only takes care of the healthy and wealthy. She needs us to pass health care plan that guarantees insurance to every American who wants it and brings down premiums for every family who needs it. That's the change we need.

Maybe if he went to Pennsylvania and met the man who lost his job but can't even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one, he'd understand that we can't afford four more years of our addiction to oil from dictators. That man needs us to pass an energy policy that works with automakers to raise fuel standards, and makes corporations pay for their pollution, and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future -- an energy policy that will create millions of new jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced. That's the change we need.

And maybe if he spent some time in the schools of South Carolina or St. Paul or where he spoke tonight in New Orleans, he'd understand that we can't afford to leave the money behind for No Child Left Behind; that we owe it to our children to invest in early childhood education; to recruit an army of new teachers and give them better pay and more support; to finally decide that in this global economy, the chance to get a college education should not be a privilege for the wealthy few, but the birthright of every American. That's the change we need in America. That's why I'm running for President.

The other side will come here in September and offer a very different set of policies and positions, and that is a debate I look forward to. It is a debate the American people deserve. But what you don't deserve is another election that's governed by fear, and innuendo, and division. What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon -- that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first.

Despite what the good Senator from Arizona said tonight, I have seen people of differing views and opinions find common cause many times during my two decades in public life, and I have brought many together myself. I've walked arm-in-arm with community leaders on the South Side of Chicago and watched tensions fade as black, white, and Latino fought together for good jobs and good schools. I've sat across the table from law enforcement and civil rights advocates to reform a criminal justice system that sent thirteen innocent people to death row. And I've worked with friends in the other party to provide more children with health insurance and more working families with a tax break; to curb the spread of nuclear weapons and ensure that the American people know where their tax dollars are being spent; and to reduce the influence of lobbyists who have all too often set the agenda in Washington.

In our country, I have found that this cooperation happens not because we agree on everything, but because behind all the labels and false divisions and categories that define us; beyond all the petty bickering and point-scoring in Washington, Americans are a decent, generous, compassionate people, united by common challenges and common hopes. And every so often, there are moments which call on that fundamental goodness to make this country great again.

So it was for that band of patriots who declared in a Philadelphia hall the formation of a more perfect union; and for all those who gave on the fields of Gettysburg and Antietam their last full measure of devotion to save that same union.

So it was for the Greatest Generation that conquered fear itself, and liberated a continent from tyranny, and made this country home to untold opportunity and prosperity.

So it was for the workers who stood out on the picket lines; the women who shattered glass ceilings; the children who braved a Selma bridge for freedom's cause.

So it has been for every generation that faced down the greatest challenges and the most improbable odds to leave their children a world that's better, and kinder, and more just.

And so it must be for us.

America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment -- this was the time -- when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals. Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.