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.

Geology field trip - Chinese style

Back at the Tianloushan site after a two day geoarchaeology field trip. We went to a number of modern quarries to get samples of rocks near the neolithic sites around here for geochemical sourcing. To be honest it looked to me like a lot of nulls - "Well, now we know that they didn't get rocks from HERE! NEXT!"

We stayed in Chiang Kai Shek's home town (Fenghua) - as they say, a nice place to be from. I'd move to Taiwan as well. To be fair, most of the buildings there are probably less than ten years old, and immediately outside of town is the most abject poverty that you can possibly imagine.

Since were were with the provincial geologist we could just drive up to any old quarry in the area, unload a team of 8 (driver, photographer, gps'er, three archaeolgists, two geologists), and start walking all over. In the US somebody (actually, a whole helluva lot of people) would have busted out the shotguns/tasers/german shephards. As it was, people would gather around and wonder what planet we dropped in from. Most places we stop, Mia and I are the first foreigners that anyone has ever seen.

The next night we were in Xianshan which is really close to Hangzhou. Much different story there. A lot more old buildings have been presereved there, one of which is the local museum that is in a 200-300 year old Bhuddist monastery. Simply beautiful. A part of China that is all to quickly being, if not bulldozed, then surrounded and overshadowed by big ugly "modern" buildings. Gotta love those museums located in gorgeous, historic buildings.

The best part about Xianshan (besides finally scoring the requested omiyagi for Lily and Kim) was finding A LOAF OF BREAD at shop right across from the hotel. Mia and I have been eating peanut butter sandwiches morning, noon and night - so niiiiice. I shoulda picked up a case of the stuff.

Tianloushan

Things have warmed up a bit here and Tianloushan. Tianlong, Heidi and I made a quick side trip a few hundred kilometers south to Fhouzhou where it was much warmer. A site visit, interview with a museum director, copious amounts of food: getting to be sort of routine.

After a few false starts with computer equipment, cables, batteries, communications, etc. things are falling into place. I've got about 4 hours of footage to boil down in to 3 or 4 videos for the upcoming exhibit at the museum. And since I don't speak a word of Chinese, Tianlong will have to sit right there with me while editing.

Not actually true. I can say a couple things: learned how to say "thank you", "hello", and "Damn!". What else do you need?

In China

We're at the Tianloushen site and it is C-O-L-D. Guess that December outside of Hawaii usually means winter in the Northen Hemisphere, but damn. The first couple of nights we stayed at hotels so things were relatively normal but now we're out in the boondoocks and things are definitely different. And so are we. Getting a lot of stares - people here haven't seen too many blue eyed, 6' tall bearded guys so I stand out a bit. Eating lots of food and drinking a lot of strange alcohol - the Chinese are big on toasting (and getting toasted;) but a bagel sounds really good about now.

The site is truly amazing - dozens of local (for lack of a better term) peasants are the diggers and we get to hang out with the bigwigs. The Hemudu culture dates fromm 7000-5500 b.p. here and is represented by more than 3 meters of deposits. The layers are chock full of pottery, animal bone, wood fragments - a treasure trove of artifacts and data. Right now I'm just running the video camera but tomorrow we'll start trying to map the site and make ourselves useful.

Off to China

Tomorrow I leave for a 16 day trip to China to (as I tell it to Lily and Jacob) make movies, take pictures, and draw maps, which is actually what I tell grownups too. Click on the map over there >>>

to see some of the places we're headed to.

The head of the Anthro department at the Museum is leading the trip and fortuantely he's born and raised in China so he'll be the local guide. Unfortuantely, he's from Beijing and can't understand the local dialect so our guide will require some local guides of his own.

There's gonna be lotsa driving and even a plane flight within China. The site has been deemed so important that they've entirely enclosed it making mapping quite civilized. But they still don't have anything more accurate than a tape and compass map so it's time to kick it up a notch (or seven).

The culture whose spread 7000 years ago in China is known as Hemudu, and there's already a pretty cool museum just down the road from our site (that we are of course going to visit) that is built next to another important site with reconstructions and everything - take a look here if you want it in English or here if lotsa Flash animations and untranslated Chinese don't scare you off (slow loading).

Down below you can see some recent pics from Thanksgiving - I'm thankful for a table that can seat more than 4 - thanks ET ! Also some shots from a recent surfing outing, a trip to maui, and pictures of Jake's new P-38.

Teamwork

Surfing family portrait

Ready to hit the beach

Stoked

No tricks - Lily stands up on a stationary board

Kim + bottle of wine = ?

Jake, U. Kunane, A. Bobbie, Kim, Tutu Kane, Lily, Fiona and Auntie Heidi's arm get ready to dig into Thanksgiving

Sally's new look

Bouncer slide fun

Closeup of the imaginary Navy P-38

Jake's new Lightning

Checking the landing gear

Making the vroom sound

On the train with Sally Sparkle II

Cool shades