27 January 2007
Done with tests and off to do some testing.
24 January 2007
In the lab
Field notes 1/23/2007. Calibration
Today Liao Wenjie, Jiang Laoshi’s graduate student who has been assigned to help me, took me to the lab to use the scale and calibrate my equipment. The lab was located in the
However, the room did contain a scale accurate to 0.0000g which I was very grateful to be able to use. The scale was small and had sliding glass doors. Inside the weighing chamber there was a small 100ml beaker containing what appeared to be salt crystals that were absorbing chemical ions in the air. The crystals were blue at the bottom of the beaker and reddish/pinkish the rest of the way up. I recorded the brand and any other data I could find about the scale in case it became useful. I also photographed it.
I began weighing the filter paper and placing each in a labeled carrying device. Since I only had 10 plastic carrying dishes, I put the 1st trip Yangjuan and Juizhaigou weighed filter papers in them. After that I devised a scheme to layer the filters in the case they arrived in with the piece of paper that had separated them denoting the label of the filter directly beneath it.
I realize that this does not protect the filters as well as if I had cases for all of them, but I only had 10 cases and this is the best solution I could come up with given I had to weigh all the filters I will need now because I may not be able to use the lab again before my second research trip. I weighed and labeled all the filters I thought I would use, the blanks, and 8 extra just in case, about 50 filters in all.
I had also planned on calibrating the rotameters today and had brought them to the lab as well. Unfortunately, when I arrived Liao Wenjie informed me that there was no 1L titration burette, the largest they had was 50ml. I was very surprised to learn this because this is a very standard piece of glass wear, but I guess I should learn not to be surprised in
So, I still have not calibrated my rotameters and pump and am leaving for Yangjuan and Xichang with Deborah and Matt on Saturday. As soon as we return from Yangjuan, around February 3rd, I will take the bus to Juizhaigou to meet Andrew Scanlon and another woman named Dawn who will be accompanying me into the valley where I will do my research. They will be working on a garden project there. I plan on carrying out the experiments anyway, since I have weighed the filters and that is the most important part. I have emailed my advising professor back at UW about possible alternative methods for calibration. I also emailed Liao Wenjie about where
21 January 2007
Playing with Swimming Friends
After a relaxing Saturday, today I went to a Buddhist temple called Luo Dai to "play" with my swimming friends. There is a word in Chinese, wanr, that the Chinese use all the time and means to go so something fun but is
The temple was very pretty too. Some of my swimming friends lit incense and prayed in front of the Buddha statue. On the way down we took a different route that was a smaller path with stone steps that went by alot of carved Buddhist statues from the Tang Dynasty. The age of things here is amazing too. These are hundreds of years old. We just don't have stuff like that in the US.
After arriving at the bottom we walked around the tourist village for awhile and had lunch. Then we returned back to ChuanDa to go swimming. After that Huangjie and another lady took me out to Huo Guo.
19 January 2007
You yong guan and UW-SCU lian huan hui
Today was my first real final. It was my Chinese writing class final. It went pretty well, which was good. After that I went swimming and took a picture of the place where I go swimming. It is the big building behind the trees. The next picture is of the entrance, which is around back.
This guy I swim with also sent me some pictures the other day, so here is a picture of me swimming at my pool.
17 January 2007
News from China
Hello Everyone! Just a quick update. This is a picture of a pond in front of the building where I have class. My mom asked for more pictures and this is the only one I remembered to take, so there you go. We call it the Mao pond because on the left hand side of the pond (the way you are looking at it now) there is a huge statue of Mao saluting (as always).
As for good news today, I went swimming at the indoor pool again and tried doing butterfly and backstroke for the first time since my surgery and it went slowly, but better than I expected. Also, I am now on the Women's Rugby Team of Chengdu. It's not as impressive as it sounds and as you all know I don't know how to play rugby. But, I was walking over to the track to go for a run this evening and as I was standing at the entrance a group of foreigners who were across the field started waving at me. I didn't know who they were but I thought I would walk over and see what they wanted. They were playing Rugby and wanted to see if I wanted to play. I decided to give it a try and it was a lot of fun. It was very informal and we just played touch, not tackle. There were 3 guys and 7 girls and we just played a pick up game for an hour or so. The guys were all from Britain or Australia and had played before and the girls had been playing for a few months anyways, but I caught on pretty quickly and they were all very nice. So I told them I would start playing with them regularly. They practice or have games about twice a week and the next game is on Saturday. Even though it's not really Chinese at all and I am just hanging out with a bunch of ex-pats, it's really fun and I am really excited about it, to learn how to play, to make some new friends, and to be on a team again. After "practice" we went to Peter's (one of the Western restaurants) as a goodbye/birthday dinner for some of the girls who had been playing. I hadn't eaten Western food in a really long time and it was overwhelming just to look at the menu. I ended up getting taco's on the recommendation of one of the British guys, Scott. I usually take recommendations at the western places because they are very hit or miss. The tacos were OK, but nothing to write home about (even though I am). It's just interesting because I thought I would miss Western food alot more than I do. I'll get little cravings every now and then, but if I just go eat some delicious Chinese food I am fine. I get cravings to make Western food more than to eat it.
13 January 2007
negotiating traffic
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Motoring madness puts spoke in China's wheel
Fintan O'Toole
Letter from Beijing: For the benefit of intending travelers, here are
some Chinese rules of the road:
1. Driving is like making cloth or baskets - the skill is in the
weaving. If there is more room on the far side of a three-lane highway,
your duty is to get into it as fast as possible. Lanes are for bowling
alleys.
2. Sound waves are a powerful form of energy. If you blow your horn
loudly and continuously, obstacles in your way will disappear, clearing
the road ahead.
3. Seatbelts restrict the flow of blood to the brain and may be
dangerous. Drivers may buckle up if they are approaching a police
checkpoint, but the belt should be removed as soon as the checkpoint is
passed. Passengers should on no account wear seatbelts, as attempts to
find the buckles which have been carefully stored under the seat covers
may distract the driver from an important mobile phone conversation.
4. When approaching a junction with a major road, enter the flow of
traffic immediately and decisively. The drivers on the main road will
be well aware of your presence, even at night, and stopping to wait for
a gap may be interpreted as an insult to their sixth sense.
5. Remember that Kung Fu movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
are entirely realistic. Chinese people can sense at all times what is
happening behind them, even without looking. They also have
lightening-fast reflexes, so any momentary danger will inevitably be
averted.
6. Overtaking is a spiritual quest, a homage to the gods of time, who
do not like to see their precious gift wasted. The less time wasted and
the more dangerous the maneuvre (for example, overtaking on a hairpin
bend on a mountain road with a ravine 5,000ft below) the greater the
devotion demonstrated. You will get your reward in the next life, a
destination which you may also reach sooner than everyone else.
7. Even the narrowest road has two sides - it is wasteful not to use
both.
8. If you find yourself facing a head-on collision with another
vehicle, it is vital to assume that the other driver will blink first
and take the necessary evasive action. If everyone abides by this
principle, then there can be no confusion. All drivers will understand
their proper responses in this situation and there can be no danger of
an accident.
I offer these rules as a cut-out-and- keep guide for anyone intending
to travel to China, because, oddly, they are not published by the road
safety authorities and can be learned only by observation. This might
suggest that they are not rules at all, but they are universally
observed in every part of China I've been to so far, and are presumably
so well understood that they do not need to be made explicit.
So deeply entrenched are these rules, indeed, that they turn on their
heads western perceptions of what is and is not good driving. In the
West, for example, someone who swings out into the middle of the road
while approaching a blind blend is a maniac who has no right to be on
the road. In China, such a person is genuinely a good driver. If you
assume that when you turn the corner, there may be cars bearing down on
you (because they are overtaking on the other side of the bend), then
it makes perfect sense to stay in the middle so that you have room, if
necessary, to swerve to either side.
This kind of skill may explain one of two astonishing aspects of Chinese driving: the relatively low rate of accidents. It is not that the carnage on the roads in China is not appalling, even by Irish standards. It is. In China, injuries from road traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people aged between 15 and 45. Every
day, about 600 people are killed and 45,000 injured on the roads. But
if you travel in buses and taxis for a while, these figures come to
seem remarkably low.
I can hardly believe that I've seen only one bad crash in the last two
months. (Though having my eyes closed most of the time may have had
something to do with it.) The other amazing thing is the relative
absence of road rage. In most other societies, driving would come to a
halt because the roads would be filled with the bodies of drivers who
had shot each other, or with the burnt-out wrecks of vehicles whose
owners had spontaneously combusted. But I've only seen one episode of
serious cursing, when a parked car suddenly and without any signal
pulled out right in front of a taxi I was in, missing it by a
centimeter. The taxi driver turned the air blue and the guilty party
gave a sheepish smile and an apologetic wave, as if he had accidentally
brushed up against an old lady's elbow.
When only the most egregious offences raise any objections, it seems
clear that all the other offences are regarded as normality.
This all means that there's no point in asking Chinese people to
explain the awful driving, since they don't regard it as awful at all.
On long drives, when I've got tired of taking the holy name in vain, I
try to calm myself by thinking up explanations. The most obvious is
that mass driving is a new thing here and that China has gone from the
ubiquitous bicycle to 130 million motor vehicles in the blink of an
eye. But such an explanation would equally apply if Chinese drivers
were slow and cautious.
I do think bicycles have something to do with it, though. Most drivers
learned their road sense in the bicycle era, when weaving around
obstacles made sense and the risks from a crash were small. Another, related, reason may be that the car is still a symbol of personal freedom, an escape from a communal rule-bound world into a private space where you can follow your own instincts. Or maybe it's just the peculiarly Chinese combination of fatalism "If I'm going to die, there's nothing I can do about it" and optimism "Sure, haven't I survived worse?" that comes from a hard history.>>
So don't be scared, although it's hard not to be. But there is nothing to be done but accept it and try to be careful, which I always am.
In other more uplifting news, I had my first final in my TV watching class on Monday and it went pretty well. We just watched a small ten-minute part of a movie and had to answer questions about it. 1 down, 6 to go. I also found out from my swimming ayi that the boy who took me swimming doesn't work where he said he worked, or so rumor has it. I don't know what to think but it i nice to know they are watching out for me.
I don't know if I should be flattered or scared
10 January 2007
Call off the search parties
03 January 2007
Chegdu Excursions
01 January 2007
Now that's the way to start to new year
The next morning was slow again. After lunch we left for the river. By the time we got there, a few hundred people were already there. All in all almost 1000 people participated and a few thousand people were there just to watch and cheer. The whole event was much more chaotic than I expected. Wu Laoshi and I stood around in the crowd for awhile until the rest of the team found us. We were in the second wave of people going. The idea was essentially that you would swim across the river dragging your clothes behind you in a waterproof bag to ring in the new year. So there was no racing or anything and once it was your