Midnight Train to Shanghai (woo woo!)

We got back to Urumqi to donate a bunch of our field equipment and attend a closing banquet with the Chinese Academy of Science and Xinjiang Normal University. These banquets are really making me question whether I want to continue to do work in China. Then we took all our luggage and Kim's samples on ice onto the Xinjiang Express! It's a 45 hour train that goes across pretty much all of China. We had soft sleepers which includes 4 beds to one room with a door. The hard sleepers in the car over had 6 beds to a division without doors. There was a dining car 1 car over and the food was overpriced, as expected. A nice surprise was that one of our cabinmates is a jewelry designer and shared tea and pictures with us. He was really nice and considerate and helped us get our baggage up and down the tall storage areas. It's a good thing Chris took me rock climbing for my birthday or I wouldn't be able to get to my bed so easily! There was no electricity or Internet or even cell service on the train so Kim and I each read 2 novels during the trip. In the dining car we noticed that the group of Kazakh men sitting near us was staring and taking pictures so we took some pictures back and offered to pose with them. Each one of them sat for a portrait with Kim! I don't look too different from them ha ha ha

Finally I can post pictures!

I'm back in Urumqi and have an internet connection again! Here are some photos:

We were finding out why these posters were hanging in the marketplace.

Xiao Hai the dog loves jerboas.

The Kazakh horse races

More later- there is much to do

Sheng Ri Kuai Le!

Yesterday started off with Kim, YangChiang, and I setting up traps for gerbils/jirds on a dune during a very hot day. Then Kim and I shaved the right toes of the jerboas to see if it would make a difference to how they interacted with the sand. I'm super excited about the results!

After a quick xiuxi (nap/rest), we were supposed to go with the driver to start work early and skip dinner. We heard that the cook was planning something special because it's our last night, and Sarah had gone in to look. When the driver hadn't arrived at his usual 20 min early, we got suspicious and decided to check into the dining hall. Awaiting us there was a huge banquet of amazing food that the cook had prepared for us. The banquet a few days ago completely pales in comparison to this one. There were apples, bananas, fuzhu tofu skins, cucumbers, bok choy with mushrooms, sprouts with jiucai, huge chickens, chicken feet, mushrooms, mutton soup, and many other things I couldn't identify. It was all laid out family style and everyone tried to sit around the huge table together, but there wasn't enough room, so we all stood up to eat. Then, Sarah and the cook brought us out 1 birthday cake each! Complete with birthday crowns and singing candles! They were beautiful!!! I couldn't believe that she managed to slip those past us even though we've been living together these past 2 weeks. Apparently she and YangChiang and the cook have been planning this since we got here. It was an incredibly sweet gesture and a wonderful way for us to all hang out together on our last night.

Part of banquet etiquette mandates that the guests of honor have to give toasts. In Kim's toast, my favorite part was when she said "I know some of you may not have very good English skills, or may have better English than you will let us know..." *huge laugh from the audience* "There's my answer to that! But we're still here for 1 more day, so please come talk to us if you want to!" After that speech, lots of people who we've never talked to came up and started conversations with us! I even got a confession of "like" from one of the boys. I wonder if public confessions like that are standard practice in China.

We got out to the desert a few hours later than we had hoped, but it was definitely worth it. We took all the data I need and were able to come back at a reasonable-ish hour. The plan for today is to pack up or discard all of our belongings. I'm really going to miss it here!

Winding down

Today is our last day and night of data collection! We were supposed to leave yesterday, but I got sick and set back our schedule by 2 days. I'm really excited to snip the hairs off the 3 toed jerboas today and see how that affects their interaction with the sand! We also want to run the animals on the harder substrate and maybe catch some more gerbils to increase sample size. The more I think about it, the more it seems like we have to do.

Looks like rigging the legs to a penetrometer isn't going to work since there is no resistance to bending in the ankle joint. My new plan is to CT scan them and do FEA as well as drag them through different kinds of sand back in a lab.

I'm pretty sad that we'll be leaving tomorrow. Our little agricultural regiment 222 feels like home now that everyone in the town knows us. There are a lot of people we'd like to meet up with one last time before we go, but it looks like we won't have enough time. I'm also going to miss the amazing view of the TianShan mountains we get every day.