Family come and gone - but I am still here

So there has been a lot that has happened in the last month since I last wrote, but I don’t think I’m going to get to all of it…. First my parents and Aunt came to visit during the last week of February, which was pretty exciting. They brought lots of reminders and tastes of home with them – including three floyds beer, hafner wine, California cheese, coffee and chocolate. Somehow nothing lasted long though…. The wine was more or less finished in one day, and the beer took 2 days. But it provided immense pleasure. We tried to supplement the great western treats with equally satiating Chinese edibles… we weren’t always successful and I think sometimes I walked them to death before any sort of carrot was reached, but all in all we had a decent taste of Chinese food. Of course dad claims that the best meal he had in all of China was when we just cooked at home but a severe prejudice against anything not homemade…

We spent most of our time in Shanghai and Hangzhou, took pit-stops at cafes and tea houses to dry from the rain and visited the restaurant recently featured in the New Yorker. I personally thought the experience was one of the best culinary experiences I had, but very different from what you would expect in a western venue.

Finally we went to Beijing, saw the great wall and the forbidden palace, and met up with one of my former Chinese teachers. She treated us to one of the best meals we had while in China.

The day after everyone left I went to Hong Kong for a 4 day Fulbright conference. It went well and gave me a chance to meet all the other Fulbrighters, and see how their work was coming along. My only complaint was that they over-scheduled us with extremely boring lectures. Even the historians in the group found the content miserable. They also took us to Macao, which is now the world’s largest casino location, but what I found fascinating about Macao were the small communities that were far removed from the glamour of the casinos. We walked through areas where the shop owners all spoke Portuguese, and little else. Amazing considering more than 95% of the people that live in Macao are Chinese. We also enjoyed some really good sea food in small two story restaurants, tightly packed with tables.

Since then I’ve been finally getting some work done. On Monday I visited the company that we’re helping develop a TB diagnostic with. I was absolutely amazed by the sophistication of their technology, the positive attitudes of their employees and the willingness to collaborate of the company owners. We’ll be helping them design new methods for collecting sputum from patients and then process it (meaning clean it more or less) for diagnosis. This is actually one of the major hurdles for developing a diagnostic that can reach rural clinics or even patient's homes (point of care), because the collection and processing of sputum requires lab equipment and can negatively affect diagnosis. Hopefully we’ll have something working by the end of my time here.

I also started a small cooking class for my lab mates. It’s not only an opportunity to eat some good food but I also make them speak English so that they have an opportunity to improve a bit. Each week I usually prepare a dish and then ask one or two of my colleagues to prepare a dish as well and teach the rest of the group in English. This week I made a mix of Indian and Chinese stir-fry, one colleague made a meatball soup, and another made a certain dried fish that is a specialty of his home-town. It was a bit crowded but we made it informal enough that as dishes were prepared and finished we could begin having samples.

That’s the short story of what’s been going on the last month. I’ll hopefully get another post out this week that will fill in some details or at least give you a closer look at my week.