Last Night In China

So here I am. Made it through a couple weeks in China. Just gotta wake up in about 10 hours and start the looooong trek home. Something like 21 hours all told, but as they say, I could do that standing on my head. The people are very nice and amazed to see something like me, but looking forward like nobody's business to (in order):

1. Cute kids and adoring/adorable wife


2. Warm weather


3. Carbohydrates based on wheat


4. Sunny skies


5. My own bed (regardless of the fact that it usually has two extra little bodies in it by the morning)


6. A DAY OFF (16 days straight without a break is too long thank you very much)


7. Air without pollution

I could go on. Must admit that being about as far as possible from GW has been nice, and walking around being gawked at as if I were a rock star is cool, and feeling like a millionaire since stuff is so cheap here is awesome, but enough is enough already.

We went into Ningbo for "American" food the other night, treating all of the crew to Pizza Hut. Now, I really don't like Pizza Hut mostly because I can't get anchovies on pizzas. And I would never tell anybody who wanted to try American food that PH is what they should try, but dammit, it was so fricking nice to feel a little bit of home. Beer straight from the bottle and drank at my own pace, not only during toasts from little glasses. No chopsticks in sight (I should say that I got a lot of compliments on my chopstick technique - people would tell each other [so Tianlong tells me] "Hey, his chopstick techniques is better than yours!"). Had the best Starbucks double expresso ever that night as well. And it wasn;t that I was just hard up for real coffee - it was excellent.

That night I could see that to be young, educated, and employed in a big city in China today, might be one of the greatest things at this moment. The energy and optimism is palpable and people are bustling about like there's no tomorrow. Even the "peasants" have brand new clothes and mopeds/bikes. In todays China, being dirt poor must be vastly different that just a couple decades ago.

The best analogy I can come up with is that the big cities are using Las Vegas as a model for growth. Crassness seems to be the overriding ideal. Shiny, blinking, loud, fast - I bet that European travellers visiting Chicago or New York in 1890-1920 thought the same thing. "What the hell are they THINKING?"

This was all brought home by the Cathedral in Ningbo that is all of 2 years old. The bottom floor of the "church" is shops, one of which looked like a soft-porn/anime video game arcade. Now, as a third generation atheist, I don't really have a problem with this sort of thing, but WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY THINKING ?!?

Fields of burning, harvested rice - visibility for most of the trip was well less than a mile. Didn't want to ask is that was fog or smog I was breathing.

Hidden beauty. Behind the new grimy walls of concrete there are pockets of peace and beauty. Definitely more factories than places like this now.

Geology. God I miss roadcuts. Basalt gets really fricking old. CONTINENTAL CRUST RULES!

Soon to be eaten. The food was great but it just wasn't the same as home. I think that I finally get the difference, though. The Chinese make everything about 400 different ways. We just stick with one or two, usually involving butter....mmmmmm...butttterrr....

The dig house. AKA The Pink Palace.

Fish vertebrae. Take a look at the scale. Those were some bigass fish that the local neolithic people were eating. LOOK AT THE BONES !

Laundry day. This day was the first sunny day in a while and EVERYBODY was doing laundry.

My room in the Pink Palace. My half more precisely. I think that all dig houses look pretty much alike on the inside.