China blocked my blog so... here's the skinny

I know most wouldn’t believe me if I said not much has happened between my last entry and now, so I’ll just think of the more exciting details and get back when more happens.
We all departed Seattle Saturday afternoon and took a ten hour flight to the Narita airport in Japan. The flight was lovely, probably the best international flight I’ve ever taken. For the first time, I did not sleep during the whole flight mostly because I was watching movies the whole time (there was a huge exciting selection).
When we arrived in Tokyo we basically had two hours to do whatever and surprisingly, the airport there didn’t seem any different that an American or Chinese airport. The only thing that I did notice were that the toilets had many, many buttons to press to customize your bathroom experience. My favorite was the water sounds button that played flushing I guess to get you in the mood or in case you have stage fright. It was pretty hilarious.

I almost forgot. Here are two pictures of the Swine Flu Squad a friend took while they pointed lasers at our foreheads and took our temperature before letting us off the plane.

We were all advised to take Tylenol before landing and thankfully nobody had to be quarantined and all who have been sick so far were sick after the flight.


We arrived in Shanghai Sunday evening and passed out at an airport hotel. Next morning we flew to Xi’an and arrived there at dinner time. We attended a banquet with all of the Chinese professors who are going to work with us. It was pretty fun, a lot of toasting… a lot of toasting. A fat stack of 57 big bottles of beer left empty all had us in bed pretty early.
The next day we met our Chinese grad student counterparts. They don’t seem to know much English at all which is a bad and good thing. Good because we can practice our Chinese (for those who actually know Chinese) and bad because we were counting on them to translate interviews with minorities whose accents will not be understood by us, the wai guo ren (foreigners).

Now my sociology group is in a bigger mess because we just found out we will not be allowed to conduct surveys at Gangcha county (the Tibetan area) because the region is too sensitive and having a bunch of Americans going around and handing out sheets to fill out would look really… sketchy and questionable. Technically we could just do interviews; however, like I said, the Chinese grad students don’t know much English and we feel a lot of information would be lost in translation. So today my group is going to meet up and change our research question so that we don’t rely on doing a comparison of the Tibetan and Salar people.

Some ideas being tossed around are to do a comparative study of people in remote villages (like Xunhua as originally planned) and villages outside of urban centers (like villages outside of Xining). Nothing is certain yet, but I will update as soon as I know.

I guess this is the nature of research in China, but our group mentor, Dr. Xiao, says that this is the nature of all research because in America, it is also difficult to get an “okay” to conduct research projects especially containing sensitive topics.
Aside from that I’m still jetlagged and cannot wait to get out of Xi’an to go on a 24 hour train ride to Qinghai province.

Thanks to my Mom and Dad for posting my blogerations