In less than 12 hours I will be heading stateside after this month-long adventure in China. Today in Beijing began with a trip to the Yonghegong Tibetan Buddhist Lama temple, the biggest one of its kind in China. I've never seen anything like it in my life, and a Guiness Book of World Records plaque confirms that the major statue of Buddha, measuring 26 meters tall, was carved from a single tree. Because it was inside a temple building, I could not take a photo, but let me say it absolutely floored me. I began my day with a coffee from [View Full Entry]

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Apologies again for what will not be an illustrated blog entry, but I haven't had the opportunity to get photos from anyone yet. So I am including a photo of two short trees covered with gold wrapping paper, making them look more like pineapples than anything else. Anyway, today is my birthday, the big 2-8, and I never thought I would spend it in southwest China on an archaeological dig. The day started out normal enough with people telling me happy birthday at breakfast, and I went to work on data entry like usual. I think I mentioned before that the [View Full Entry]

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Internet access is becoming more sparse as is my spare time to obtain it, but I was absolutely stunned today to realize that it's already January 10th and I will be flying home on the 16th. The entire time I've been here I have been semi-aware of the date, but never the day of the week. We work six or seven days on, one day off, and that day off has been different each time. My professor took eight of us to see the Jinsha site museum in Chengdu. They discovered this massive complex in 2002 and already have an absolutely [View Full Entry]

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ME! Of course. So let me give a little lead-in for this one. I drank an expired canned coffee drink that I bought at a grocery (I was unaware of the expiration date at the time of consumption), and let's just say it's has had dire digestive consequences. Spicy Sichuan food did not help the situation. So after subsisting on two bowls of rice a day for three days (because I had to work out in the field where bathrooms (read:bamboo groves or tree lines) can be scarse), I did not need anything else to traumatize my body. Enter brittle tile. [View Full Entry]

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Sorry for the absence from blogging, but I've been walking through fields, digging holes, sorting out pottery, and covering myself with mud for the past five days. Anyway, New Year's Day in Chengdu was fantastic. We got up late, hit the hotel breakfast right before they closed it, then popped over to the Starbucks. Tasted just the same, and the prices are just the same as they are in America. My grande mocha cost 29 quai, which adds up to around $4.50, but for most Chinese people this is extremely expensive. After Starbucks we wandered around streets of western-style shops, all [View Full Entry]

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So after a loooooooooooooooooooong dinner composed entirely of different varieties of mushrooms and copious amounts of beer and wine, eight of us stayed in Chengdu for the night. We wanted to do karaoke, but all the places were filled, so we headed for the hotel instead. Because dinner was mushrooms-only, we were starving and went to the 24-hour McDonald's. Yes, at the turn of the New Year I was in line at McDonald's. We all hugged and shouted happy new year, but the rest of the McDonald's clientele was unimpressed. I will write more on the rest of our day yesterday [View Full Entry]

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Happy New Year's Eve from Pi Xian! We're going into the big city to stay the night and have a nice dinner, then do some sightseeing and hanging out in the Starbucks to use the wireless. I've been drinking freeze-dried Nestea coffee for the last week and a half. I purchased a "coffee milk tea" thing from the big grocery. It' was shrink-wrapped so I figured it would be ok. Nope. It's a cup that contains dry packets to mix together. However, there was some water inside the cup. It smelled horrible. "Coffee Milk Tea" was subsequently thrown in the garbage [View Full Entry]

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Yes, we did come here for reasons other than the panda population. We are doing a survey archaeological project in Pi Xian (Pi County) in Sichuan province. Chengdu is the closest big city, but this city isn't small. We have two types of field teams. The first is the survey team: a line of people spaced evenly apart will walk fields together, picking up pottery on the ground and scraping the sides of terraces with trowels for more pottery. Fragments are collected and GPS points are recorded. We also record any tombs or other architectural remains. The second is the auger [View Full Entry]

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Even though we were in Chengdu for one day and night, I was relieved that we had time to go see the Chengdu Panda Breeding Center. It was a cold and gray day, and a lot of the things in the park were closed for the winter, but there were plenty of pandas about. The first thing we saw was a huge group of female peacocks, and the first few panda enclosures were empty, but then we hit the jackpot. Even though they're a bit on the roly-poly side, pandas are pretty agile in trees. We watched one trying to take [View Full Entry]

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Merry Christmas everyone! We FINALLY have internet at the hotel, and I apologize for not updating the blog. I will do multiple installments about the past week in the next couple days. So...my prof made it on our plane from Seattle to Tokyo to Beijing, and we arrived around 10 pm (some day last week...I am totally confused about time right now). We took a taxi to BeiDa (Beijing University) and stayed the night there. On the drive over I got to see the Olympic Stadium and the Water Cube...very cool. I also saw the biggest Ikea store EVER. We spent [View Full Entry]

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