Life in the Trenches

I'm back in the land of the living! Well, for the morning, at least. My collaborator, Liu Kang, has some business he needed to attend this morning, so he dropped me at some office (China Earthquake Administration, perhaps? I can't read anything, so who knows!) where there is an internet plug that I can hook my computer up to! This means that I get to tell you all what I've been up to...

So where I last left off was we were moving into a small apartment. Well, it's fairly crummy accomodations, but at least we have beds to sleep in, albeit uncomfortable and hard beds.

Our average day goes something like this:
Get up at 6:30, around 7:15 our breakfast is ready. Usually we steam our leftovers from the night before and have noodle soup or a type of flat bread with that. We take a taxi at 8 to our field site and work from about 8:15 or 8:30 until 5 PM when the taxi picks us up and takes us back to our apartment. In the field, I am "logging" the walls of our trench, which basically entails detailed largescale sketching of different soil/rock layers and how they intersect with each other. From that, we can piece together the history of the area, and try to figure out when earthquakes occured that displaced the sediments. To get actual dates, I have to meticulously--it is a painfully slow process--collect carbon samples from each layer. I will take them back to the US and have the samples run at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (I'm pretty sure that's in Berkeley). Once we know the ages of the layers, we can bracket the dates in which the earthquakes had to have occured.
Here is a picture of me logging one of the walls of our trench:At night, we get home and I go to a Chinese bathouse. This is basically a room with about 20 showers, and a bunch of Chinese women staring at me. I am the only foreigner ever to visit the bath house, according to the women who owns it. Then we go to a restaurant (the same one every night) and eat a few of about 8-10 dishes that I can actually eat.
After that, we head back to the apartment and switch on the TV. There is one English channel, and so we usually end up watching a compilation of English and Chinese TV. We also discuss a plan for the next day's work, and talk over any problems or questions that we have.

My adviser left 3 days ago, so it just me, Liu Kang, and another student, Lao Hou (who is gone right now, but will be back tomorrow).

I don't have much time left to write, but here are a few pictures highlights of our work:

This is a fairly representational view of Tangshan. It is a working class community, and fairly dirty/polluted. The people here are very nice, though!

This is a view of our bathroom. Notice the showerhead over the toilet. That is why I go to the bath house!

We have been hiring day laborers to help with the general physical tasks that need to be accomplished at the site. This was a particularly funny guy (also most definitely an alcoholic) who kept slinging dirt over his shoulder.

Here is a view of one of the shops we went in to buy hardware supplies. They are all like this--packed to the brim with supplies. If you can put more in your store, that means you can sell more things and make more money!

And finally, here is a view of a typical dinner for four. Soup, Kung Pow Chicken (it's sooo much better in China!), bread, more soup, and some beef.

That's all for now... Hopefully more in a few days!