Kubuqi desert aka Warren photoshoot

As I had said earlier, I decided to break down the Inner Mongolia post into two parts.
This being the second. Rather than being focused on the Kubuqi desert it is more of Warren's photoshoot result.

On our 2nd day in Inner Mongolia, we went to the Kubuqi desert. Late October seemed to be the perfect time. It was a little cold, but in the bright desert sun, it wasn't too bad and it wasn't crowded. After renting out our awesome desert shoes, of which one of mine had a hole and defeated the purpose, we went on to explore the desert. Warren, fearing the health of his camera being invaded by sand particles, left it in the car and thus, by default because the photo subject.

We had a fun camel ride, and Warren lurved his camel. I was glad to be sitting at the very front, so as to not smell too much camel, but that did end up bringing the rear camels head way too near to my foot for comfort. However, it was a calm ride ( at least the camel did not spit).



Then it was decided that the desert was a perfect place for jumping pictures.

Warren did some awesome jumps, as captured here. Our tour guide was impressed by Warren's skillz. He said he watched Warren jump from the other side of the camp, which was slightly creepy but understandable. 

I did not do so well, when I had to jump. It seems that I was trying to do a really bad impression of the Karate kid crane stance mid air.

VS

After we got tired of jumping, by which I mean inhaled too much sand, Warren posed for "awesome white person in desert" shots. A few from the collection are shown here:











The day ended with a sand slide. It was a bad decision in retrospect. Sand ended up entering my ears, nose, eyes, hair, permeated through my clothes and needless to say, it did not make the over-night train ride to Beijing easy. As if the snoring and Chinese radio shows weren't bad enough, the feeling of sand on your body that scratched every time you moved, made that train ride unforgettable to say the least.

Inner mongolia - Hohhot

Towards the end of October, I was getting a little travel lusty and convinced Warren to take a weekend trip. 

Inner mongolia, a north-eastern province of China with its grasslands and deserts seemed inviting enough.

I did enlist the help of a travel agent who said that we would live in yurks at the grassland, see Mongolian people dancing at the bonfire and other fun things. We did know it was cold and we wouldn't see rolling green grasslands but we hadn't imagined quite this:

We arrived at an ungodly hour at 4am at Hohhot (pronounced as Hu-huh-haw-tuh). Then proceeded to the "grasslands". It was freezing and I was shivering and just wanted to go back and sit in the van (which we did after sunrise). The whole dew freezing at dawn made for this empty beer bottle to look artistic.

We did see the sunrise and our over enthusiastic guide took a picture of Warren and I holding the glowing sun !

The rest of the grassland day was kind of a let down though. We saw some horses but didn't ride them because everything was barren. We had lunch with the Mongolians (no fire included) and I tasted some of their wine which I think was 50% ethanol (*gags*). Due to the freezing conditions, our yurk stay was canceled and we proceeded to the city. Warren and I decided to just go exploring the town on our own and that was quite fun. We saw a temple, giant statues, walked around in the market etc.

But the highlight of the day was going through the local vegetable market and looking at the ginormous produce. We were amazed at the sizes of scallions and carrots and onions they were selling. See for yourself:

Later we had dinner at a non-English speaking place with a Chinese menu. It was quite eventful as the adjoining table had 6 boisterous middle-aged men whose goal was to make conversation with us. Warren and I tell Chinese people that we don't speak Chinese usually as an opening line. That is a good way to stop them from bombarding us with questions. In reality we know a tiny bit of survival Chinese but our vocabulary being limited to about 20 words or so, doesn't really help us in carrying out social conversations. 

However, this dinner group was not deterred by our inability to speak the language. I think they believed that if they talked "louder" and "used more words", we would eventually understand what they are saying. They were sorely mistaken though. I am still not sure what they were trying to say. They gave up eventually, but ended up taking pictures with Warren and I (more with Warren, him being white and all) as a consolation prize. 

It was a quaint town, not touristy at all. We went through the entire day and almost the whole weekend, without seeing any foreigners !

I was going to write about going to the desert the next day, but that is going to be a tribute to Warren's jumping picture modeling skillz, so it shall be a separate post, hopefully soon.

Children acrobats - China

As our Inner Mongolia tour did not meet our expectations (blog post to be written soon), I coerced/blackmailed/convinced our tour operator to reimburse us or make it up to us. She offered free tickets to a show either Beijing opera, Kung fu or Acrobatics.

It was easy to rule out Beijing opera. Neither Warren or I wanted to listen to the wailing & clanging that the opera is famous for. We had heard a part of it during a ballet show and that was the limit of our "cultural immersion" when it came to the opera. Then it was down to Kung fu vs Acrobatics. I decided to go with acrobatics. I thought it would be cool tricks, with crazy flexibility. And I was right about that, except I did not think the tricks will be performed by kids who were barely even teenagers, if that.

Warren and I got to the show late, due to bad directions. We had really good seats. And once the show started, we saw little kids on the stage. This made us uncomfortable - we wanted to enjoy the show but not support children being on stage to perform day after day. And some of the acts, just could not be safe for your body. But the show was pretty good.

I wonder how long the kids were trained for. But when you see a girl doing the following act (and see all her muscles ripple) and she doesn't even look like a teenager, you wonder if that is an indication why China wins so many gold medals in gymnastics:

And then there was this cutest kid who did some daredevil tricks. He was happy, jumping around and making everyone cringe in their seats.

But then, if you had a telephoto lens and could creep on his face, he looked just like another kid, scared to make a mistake.

 There was also a lot of standing on other people's heads, balancing things using your teeth and doing crazy splits. I just would have felt better if everyone was a little older...
And also if they did not have tacky digital backgrounds like a swan (or a blue vase)

There were also a few other acts. One in particular made both Warren and I think about the Human Centipede movie (open link at your own risk).

The show ended with 5 motorcycles in a sphere which was absolutely terrifying. I have a video, but it won't do justice.

After the show, I looked into the legal aspects of allowing kids to perform and there wasn't a whole lot written about it. I just found one article that talked about parents "renting" their kids to be street performers. But I wonder if that is also the story at big establishments in Beijing. These shows are famous, ticket prices go from 120 - 600 yuan ( 20 - 100 USD). Maybe there is a legal way of doing it or maybe no one pays a lot of attention to it, but it is difficult to believe that these kids are still going to school and living a normal life when they are performing crazy stunts on the stage day in and day out.

Erm, there is a dead rat on my bike

My research involves performing animal experiments. I work with rat models. So needless to say, it also involves sacrificing animals for the sake of science. It isn't a pleasant thing to do, but it's one of the many things science demands.

At least in the US, the most transfer of animals I had to do was limited within one building. However, China is a different story. First, to get approval has been a long process. They had to do a special training for me in English... Our first preliminary study involved just some characterization, so not an extensive experiment. My lab mate told me to meet him at lab and then we would proceed. So I biked to lab and on getting there he told me that we need to go to the Life sciences building. The life sciences building is a 5-10 minute bike ride  from my lab. So we headed off there. My lab-mate is essential here, he speaks Chinese and can communicate with the animal lab official who don't speak English.We get there, and the officials first hand us a live rat. This is the conversation that follows:

Me (M) - Why did they give us a live rat?
Labmate (L) - We asked for a live rat
M - We need to sacrifice the rat, we can't take a live rat back to lab (which is 10 mins away)
L - What, we don't?
M - How do we sacrifice a rat at our lab? (Our lab is mainly cellular biology)
L - Don't we bleed it to death ?
M - NOOooOoOOOoo
L - Oh.
M- Erm...
L - So what do we do?
M - Can you ask them if they have a method to do it here in the animal lab?
Much conversation in Chinese ensues
L - There is another way, they have CO2
(I heave a sigh of relief, I did not want to deal with a bloody rat)
M - That works
L - Okay

So then they sacrifice the rat, and put it in a shoe box with some bedding and hand it to us...
Now my lab-mate is holding a cardboard box with a dead rat body inside. And we still need to get back to lab. We come outside the life sciences building and then he goes - "Oh, your bike has a basket". We then arrange the cardboard box with a dead rat inside it on my bike and we head back. (While I am screaming inside my head, there is a dead rat on my bike)

That is the story of how I got a dead rat on my bike.

(When our animal numbers increased, we could no longer bike due to the need of a "bigger box". Now we walk a whole 15 mins, when it is below freezing outside to get more samples back in a bigger thermocol box that once housed some machine...)