Hou Hai and Homo erectus

I had the last few days of last week off, which I tried to spend being productive, but that was only moderately successful. I did work on summarizing up the research that I've been doing on my days off, but in the end, boredom while being alone at Wanliu in a large city as Beijing while everyone else was at work finally took over. Work in the lab is such a large part of my life, and a meaningful and enjoyable one too, that on days that I was not required to go in, I found myself at the chemistry building anyways meeting people for dinner or making plans to hang out around the area.

This week at the lab I started what will likely be my last reaction, and my graduate student helped me with the poster, abstract, and presentation for the UMPKU program. For the Olympics, security will be checking for university IDs of everyone entering the campus starting July 21, but this week the checks were supposed to be random, and of course, I was called over for a check while entering the chemistry building gate. When the guard asked for an ID, I handed him my passport, but he kept repeating the request despite my saying in Chinese that I didn’t understand (which seems to be a general theme) until finally I said in English that I didn’t understand, and he just let me go. We sent in our pictures though, so hopefully by next week we will have proper IDs to wander the campus while it’s emptier.

The weekend was much more exciting, especially since we got two days of clear blue skies. Zhaleh, Kelly, Zach, Donna, Spencer, and I rented a pedal boat for a couple hours to go around the lake Hou Hai where we had gone through earlier in the trip to see Hutong, traditional Chinese houses. There were lots of other boats on the lake, as well as a group of men and boys swimming in it.

On Sunday, we went to the Peking Man site, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, at Zhoukoudian at Zach's suggestion and got a unique experience exploring suburban Beijing. The 3 hr bus trip there required three different buses, where each time we would have to ask the conductor to alert us at our stop since we didn't know what we were looking for, and bus stops in the suburbs seem to be unmarked. For knowing minimal Chinese, we did successfully get to our destination and back in an unknown territory, which definitely made us feel accomplished, though it also helped that Julia had written down our stops in Chinese and given us directions for the bus routes. The exhibit at Zhoukoudian was pretty interesting, especially walking around knowing that 200,000-500,000 years ago, Peking Man, or Homo erectus, had lived in the area. There weren't many tourists, and it was refreshing to walk through the trees and caves. We mostly walked through the different localities where fossils and bones had been discovered, and there was a museum containing replicas, since the original bones had been lost during WWII.

Since the Wanliu shuttle has stopped running, we've been forced to take the much more crowded, longer public bus route to the university. I've been taking it to the west gate in the mornings because of my slight obsession with the bao zi that they serve at the noodle cafeteria, though it's only a noodle cafeteria for lunch and dinner. Inside the bus, there's a sign saying "Please take the initiative for bringing invalidity pregnant parks." Interpretation - ? The picture seems to suggest that the seats should be given to the disabled, pregnant, elderly, or small children, but the English was just funny.