The last few days of the conference were very conference-like, lots of talks, eating, networking etc. In the evenings we went out to different places in Chengdu. We found another tourist district with narrow historic lantern-lit streets and lots of things to buy. I especially liked the booth where you spin a wheel and it lands on an animal and the man draws that animal with sugar syrup that solidifies into a tasty lollipop:


We also saw this man smoking an extra long pipe, the smoke must have been cold and clammy by the time it got to his lungs:


and discovered an ancient chinese Starbucks:

At the end of the conference we went to dinner with a few of the chinese students who study in the US to a nice restaurant in downtown Chengdu where we tried mung bean juice, apple vinegar drink, chicken feet etc (see photo below)


Most of the food we were served during the conference was traditional Sichuan food and almost nothing had wheat in it and it was no problem for me to find tons to eat. At this restaurant, however, they had a lot of dumpling dishes etc. so we told the waitresses I couldn't eat wheat so to replace the dumpling dishes they brought me a giant bowl of warm sweet fungus soup. Mmmm...

The day after the conference ended, a few of us who were flying back to the US had an extra day and we used it to wander around Chengdu and to see the pandas! We took a cab out to the Panda refuge on the edge of town and saw truckloads of the cartoonish creatures, including some fuzzy unreal baby pandas that were wrestling with each other. I couldn't get a good picture of them because of the crowds around them, but I have plenty character-filled photos of older pandas



Afterwards, we randomly wandered around Chengdu. We found an amazing old temple downtown by chance. It was filled with curly-roofed buildings and giant buddha statues and a tower that had a thousand little buddhas on it. We wandered through the peaceful temple grounds. There were real monks wandering around all over the place. We had some jasmine tea in their tea garden along with all the locals who brought their own picnics.




That last night we went back to one of the night markets and had a fancy meal to end a week of extravagant Sichuan cuisine and departed the next morning for a long airplane ride home and lots of terrible airline food (the only food that I got sick from on the whole trip was United airline food....hm...). And with that, China was over. I think I'll go back.

I put all my pictures online from the China trip: https://picasaweb.google.com/allstadt.k/EarthquakeConferenceInChengduChina#


On Day 4, we took a break from the conference that had just begun and embarked on a fieldtrip with the entire group of conference attendees this time. We filled three big tour buses. Everywhere we went, we formed a seismologist parade. I felt a little safer on the road this day since our huge buses had more momentum than most other vehicles on the road and also they were not nimble enough to make the hairraising types of maneuvers our little buses from the first two days made.

Our first stop was to a valley filled with farms where we found the fault scarp, this time a double step, on the edge of a construction zone/gravel pit. All 60 of us poked around the fault scarp and wandered through the farm fields where the new “terrace” popped up three years ago. All the locals just went about their business and hardly seemed to notice the swarm of scientists amongst their canola plants (see below). I guess they are used to it by now.


Our next stop was much more sobering, we headed toward the region of Beichuan, the worst-hit town in the earthquake and also, not coincidentally, where the maximum surface slip of the fault occurred. We first drove through the town, as we wound down the switch-backs in the road approaching the steep mountain valley town, what we saw was straight out of one of those apocalyptic films. Hundreds of ruined buildings tipped every which way, as if floating on a sea of rubble, landslides burying half the buildings and pushing the other half around like chess pawns. Part of the town was under water where the river was rerouted by landslides. Immediately after the earthquake it was impossible for rescuers to access the town because landslides took out all of the roads, and the narrow mountain valley topography meant there was only one or two roads to begin with, so the survivors were on their own for quite a while. One of the main Chinese seismologists said he was there soon after the earthquake, when the first outside rescuers finally made it in, and after seeing, and smelling, the death, destruction, and tragedy, he could not sleep for three nights.


We passed through the nightmare for now, heading to the edge of town where we found the largest vertical displacement along the fault of 9 meters! We had to climb up a hillside to get there. The scene we came across was of a three-story building still standing, but damaged, that abutted a huge hill 9 meters tall with a steep treeless slope. In the first picture below, you can see the house from far away, the hill at the right is the scarp, that hill wasn't there before! It rose out of the ground in probably less than a minutes time! The second picture is a view of the house from the top of the scarp, as you can see, the top of the scarp is higher than the house.


The owners of the house originally built there for the view over the valley, so this hill popped up 9 meters in a matter of seconds during the earthquake and blocked the view! Completely unimaginable. It’s amazing that a house so close to the scarp was still standing and structurally sound, though we heard that the grandmother living in the house was thrown out of the window due to the shaking and was killed. There were graves under big piles of rocks all over the hillside and people's belongings strewn about in the woods, half-decomposing. A heartbreaking scene to encounter: the detritus of ruined lives (see below).


The trip back through the ruined town prolonged the heartbreak. This time we stopped and walked around the road that they cleared of debris so people could come see the ruins. We all placed a yellow flower on the memorial to the victims near a huge landslide that buried a school containing 400 children. Bodies are still under the enormous pile of rocks, a chilling thought. After placing the flowers, we dispersed and walked around in awe and silence. I felt like I was being disrespectful to keep snapping pictures, but the sights were just so unbelievable I couldn’t stop even though it made me sick. Tour buses roared through town at top speed honking their horns to pick up and drop off tourists and many of whom were talking loudly and laughing like they were at Disneyland, and I couldn’t stand it.


Building after building was completely or partially collapsed. Many of them were pushed off their foundations by the landslides and stacked up against other buildings. Most structures had a collapsed first story (soft-story again), some had entire walls missing or staircases dangling from strings of rebar. Cars and motorcycles were crushed under concrete monoliths. Some buildings folded like decks of cards. A bridge across the river that led to a tunnel was transformed into a strangely beautiful waterfall arching over the river. This perplexed us for hours until we finally learned that there was a lake on the other side that overflowed due to landsliding and has been pouring out ever since.




There were signs in front of many of the buildings saying who was killed there, showing their haunting faces, and sometimes telling stories of bravery and rescue. The one small bit of humor I found, probably the only bit to be found in the entire city, maybe the entire valley, was a sign outside the building that once housed the "Beichuan State Administration of Taxation." The sign said, and I quote: “A heart devoted to tax career still exists as before, although homes were ruined. The survived employees of Beichuan State Administration of taxation displayed their vigor in the emergency moment and set out to deal with the first tax-involved business in the 15th day after the earthquake…Because of their outstanding performances, one of the survived employees was awarded with glorious title of National Model for Earthquake Emergency Relief”

To cheer us up afterwards, we all stopped at a restaurant for "hot pot" on the way home. Hot pot is a dish that originates in Chengdu where there is a giant bubbling pot built into the table, the outer ring has super spicy broth and the inner ring has mild broth for wimps. The servers bring a giant stand filled with plates of everything imaginable and things you don't want to imagine too, and you throw whatever you want into the boiling pot. They are adding congealed duck blood that I mistaked for jell-o in the picture below. It turned brown once it was cooked and actually tasted quite nice, for what it was.

The conference proper began on the third day and all of a sudden everything got real formal, real fast. The rest of the attendees showed up in their fancy business suits and milled about donning nametags and networking. My fellow fieldtrip participants shed their duck boots and khaki hiking pants and donned shiny shoes and ties.

The day began with opening speeches from important seismologists from both China and the US. This was not quite on par with the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, but I was impressed at the gymnastic abilities of the waitresses serving tea during the speeches. They kept each and every one of our tea cups filled to the brim with hot jasmine tea during the whole ceremony, raising and replacing the ceramic lids without making a sound or distracting from the speeches. That's probably the least important part of the whole conference, but for some reason the formality and grace of the servers in China is fascinating to me. They always look so calm and composed, and there must be some sort of training camp to get them to all bow slightly and extend open palms just right, because they all know how to do it. Anyway, I digress.
After the opening formalities came the keynote talks from the seismo bigshots. After just a few years of being involved in science, I have had endless opportunities to listen to presentations that make me want to drill my eyes out with my pencil and curse the day Microsoft ever invented powerpoint. Scientists are quite good at making interesting things excruciatingly boring, which is probably why most kids would rather be NASCAR drivers and why I often contemplate dropping out of grad school and becoming a farmer/painter/acrobat. Most of these keynote talks, however, were not the typical science talk, they were of the rare variety that keeps me hanging on every word and reminds me why I ever liked science in the first place. There were a few more of these types of talks interspersed throughout the rest of the conference, I'd say on average there was a higher percentage of excellent talks at this conference than usual (but also plenty of eye-drilling talks too).


So the talks went on for the rest of the day, I had a poster that I presented on the work I'm doing with seismically induced landsliding in Seattle, but there wasn't really a designated time for poster presentations like there is at most conferences. People were supposed to view the the posters during tea breaks, but everyone, including myself, just wanted to drink tea and talk to each other. That was fine by me, my poster didn't really have any results on it, though it sure looked nice if I do say so myself. The staff at the hotel taped our posters up with black duct tape. The duct tape didn't hold very well so half the posters would come crashing down during talks, it was kind of entertaining to see the staff scrambling. They even taped some of the posters directly onto paintings on the walls. Anyway, I gained more from one on one discussions with people on the field trip, at meals and in taxi rides than I would have standing at my poster talking to people anyway.

The food for practically every meal was provided by our generous Chinese hosts. The first few days when we were on the fieldtrip we ate out at restaurants in the style I described in previous posts and I usually didn't know what I was eating. When we got to the hotel, however, they had a big buffet for every meal, including breakfast, which was great, but the downside was that they labeled the food! All of a sudden what had been my favorite dishes turned into pig ears or duck blood and pig trachea soup etc. etc. and my favorite foods quickly dropped down on the favorite list and I began to eat more and more apples, rice porridge, potatoes, and eggs. My favorite thing on the buffet was this juice from a fruit I had never heard of before called "pow pow juice." It had such an exotic taste! I figured it was probably chock-full of antioxidants that would cure every disease and it simply hadn't been discovered by US health gurus yet so I chugged glass after glass of it. Turns out they just labeled it wrong, a few days later they changed the label to pineapple juice and it lost all of its glamour...sigh...

Another good thing about the field trip days, besides blissful ignorance, was that there was no "class system." Grad students hung out with big-shot scientists etc. etc., but as soon as the conference began we started sitting at different tables, sometimes they even had an "important person" table up front with extra big floral arrangements. It wasn't mandated, just some unwritten rule about our new formal surroundings or something. At our first meal in the hotel I accidentally sat next to one of the leaders of the National Science Foundation and I ended up being the only person under the age of 60 without a PhD or two and hundreds of scientific papers to my name.

For the first day of the conference they threw a big banquet with endless amounts of fancy food again and all the leaders gave toasts. There were a lot of leaders, so the toasting went on for hours. The leaders from the US gave gifts to all the Chinese leaders in the form of baseball caps and t-shirts from UC Boulder (where the conference was two years ago). The irony was that all the gifts were made in China :)

After the conference I went with a few friends to a place called Jinli Road. This is a major tourist destination in Chengdu, it's a pedestrian marketplace where they sell Chinese arts and souvenirs out of historical buildings. It was a beautiful place, hundreds of glowing chinese lanterns floated overhead and the architecture was stunning, wood screens and curly roofs. I bought some souvenirs and for once I wanted to ensure that they were made in China.


A funny thing about having blond hair in China is that not only do people stare openly, but they also want to take their picture with you. I felt like a moviestar. Some people would ask and pose with us, but other people would just snap a picture real quick and walk away. My favorite one was when a family wheeled an old man in a wheelchair right next to where my blond friend and I were sitting on a wall, so close that they bashed his wheelchair into my knees. They snapped a picture of the old man and his two blond girlfriends and then wheeled him away quickly without ever saying a word or looking us in the eye like we were statues or something.


My favorite things about Jinli road were the 2000 year old shooting game (I got a bullseye!) and fresh squeezed sugarcane juice! Mmmmm....

Day 2 in China: we hit the road even earlier today because we traveled further north to a town called Bailu (the “#1 township for love” according to a billboard). This town was under major reconstruction to repair the damage from the earthquake and they decided to turn it into some sort of fake Disneyland/Ching dynasty resort. As we drove in, we passed endless rows of blue and white temporary earthquake housing with people still living in them even three years later.


Our first stop in town was at the site of another unlucky middle school. In this case they were luckier than they could have been because the fault cut right between two buildings and did not collapse either one, just a small building that crossed the fault. So what was once a flat courtyard is now a big ramp.
(people walking up a ramp that used to be a flat courtyard)

The Chinese geologists dug a trench here as well to look for traces of previous earthquakes and again found a 3000-year recurrence interval and offsets for the 2008 earthquake of about 2 meters. Once again they are seizing the opportunity for tourism and they are building an earthquake museum (of course it is right across the fault…hmm…) where there will be a big shake table people can stand on to experience an earthquake.

We then walked around the town on the hill across the river. The old part of town is over there, it was heavily damaged. But what was most interesting was the new construction. They were reconstructing this old town into a cross between Disneyland and a Ching dynasty historical park. They had built a “castle” and some buildings straight out of Paris and/or Cinderella. Also some beautiful buildings in architecture from the Ching dynasty for hotels. They didn’t really mix well together, I would have left off the Cinderella themed buildings because the Ching dynasty style buildings are beautiful, with wood trim and elaborate wooden screens over the windows.



It’s amazing how they were building things though, much of it was by hand. Labor is cheap in China, as we all know. There was some machinery, like a tractor sized cement mixer and some trucks carrying things around, but there were also women carrying buckets of cement up the hill on their shoulders with a bucket hanging on each side of a shoulder yoke. Much of construction is done by hand, I even saw a group of men paving a wide road with hand trowels in another city.



The public toilet in that town was the most disgusting place I had ever been in my life. Public toilets in the part of China I was in at least, tended to have no doors and walls only a few feet high, much less privacy than we’re accustomed to. They never have western toilets because I hear that Chinese people think it’s gross to sit on toilet seats in public rest rooms, so they are either the French style squatting toilets, or long troughs that flow between the stalls that you have to squat over and when you look down you see everything flowing past from the other stalls. Not the most elegant situation. To make it worse, the bathrooms are usually disgusting, but the one in Bailu was the worst. I won’t describe it, but will just show the picture and just say that I now understand why it’s so important to take ones shoes off when going inside someone’s house in China.


Another interesting thing about this town was the bird cage hanging outside practically every shop and house containing a singing bird of some type. I asked one of the Chinese grad students about this and he said they have them for the tourists. People in Chengdu don’t see birds very often in the city because there aren’t any trees for them, he said, so they like to see them in the countryside. After that, I noticed the strange quietness around the city streets of Chengdu. No pigeons!! No junkos, finches or other city birds that thrive on trash in US cities that also can be lacking trees. I don’t really know why there weren’t many birds in the city, but I do know that we had pigeon served at our fancy welcome banquet. And they included the roasted heads, beak and all, on the plate so that we knew it was fancy expensive pigeon and not something cheaper. I had trouble eating that one, how could I with those cooked and sauce-covered eyes staring at me.

Moving on. We left Bailu and drove a long way through farmlands where a crop of something that looked like chives was being harvested by hand and piled on bicycles, three-wheeled trucks and in hand carried baskets to be taken (I assume) to market. We stopped in a town called Mianzhu where they are famous for making liquor, which was apparent from the brewing scent that permeated every inch of the town. We had lunch here, but they didn’t give us any of their famous liquor with lunch unfortunately, though we had some of the strong stuff later. It is called Baijiu (white brew), and is too strong to drink plain for my liking, but tastes like smarties sugar candies a bit and is really nice when mixed with medicinal Chinese herb brews.

Where we stopped for lunch, the earthquake damage was not apparent, but we drove just a bit further and all of a sudden we had reached a ghost town of earthquake destruction, it seems like there must have been really localized site amplification of the ground shaking for this terrible damage to be right near areas that did not seem that bad-off. At this site there is a clock tower that stopped exactly at 2:28 when the earthquake happened and still stands there today. I was walking slowly and snapping pictures of it and nearly walked into an open manhole on the sidewalk. I wonder how many earthquake relic tourists they catch in that trap each year.


Thousands of people were killed in this area, as was a massive statue of the ruler of the Han dynasty riding a horse. His head rolled off and was lying on the ground next to him along with some other giant heads.


Finally we left for our last stop of the pre-conference field trip to another small tourist village called Jinhua. Here the fault scarp was uplifted a mere 0.7m. What was more impressive was how small this fault scarp was compared to the towering cliffs several hundred meters high on either side of the valley. And how this small amount of uplift could be so powerful to cripple a huge factory complex nearby and turn it into yet another earthquake relic tourist site. (see seismologists joking around with a curious local in the field at the last stop)



There were many factories in this valley, just the one closest to the fault seemed to be crippled and still twisted and damaged with trees starting to grow on the roofs. Some further away that we drove past reminded me of what it must have been like in the early industrial-era factory towns in the eastern US. There was a big factory, and then not so far away a small town that was obviously built just for people to live in who work in the factory. Another thing I noticed here and in other places we drove through, most houses had small thermal solar heaters on their roofs as well as cisterns to collect rainwater. Why aren’t those more ubiquitous in the US? They make so much sense. Even if you can’t heat water completely through thermal solar, just partial heating can save a lot of energy.

We returned that night to Chengdu and moved to a new fancier hotel located in a garden along the river. There were live musicians playing in the huge marble coated lobby and a woman whose job it was to press the elevator button and indicate which elevator to use with a slight bow and outstretched hand. I shared a room with a graduate student at MIT who was from China originally and she was really nice. Our room was fancy, with slippers that were laid out for us each afternoon, a view of the river and a pair of gas masks. One curious feature was a window into the bathroom right where one would like to have a mirror.

That evening a few of us went for a stroll in the gardens around the hotel with its elaborate statues, living pagodas made out of vines, pigeon coops, colorful lights and water features. We tried to stroll on the path along the river, but the stench of sewage was overwhelming. Not the kind of waterway I would want to swim in. Regardless, it was a beautiful evening and I was so happy to be able to walk outside and be warm in the evening. It will be a few months before that happens in Seattle :)

So I went to China last week (I back-dated all the entries to the correct dates, I'm actually publishing these April 30). I'm not sure how I ended up there, but I'm certainly glad I did. I attended the Sino-American earthquake workshop. The purpose of the meeting was to foster US and Chinese cooperation in earthquake research. The conference took place in Chengdu in the Sichuan province of Southern China, which is located in a basin near the edge of the Tibetan plateau, and also quite close to the fault on which the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake occurred.

As I embarked on my 24-hour flight (see picture of Kamchatka from the plane below) to a country where I didn't speak the language and didn't know a single human being, I was a little bit concerned. But luckily when I got to Beijing to catch the flight to Chengdu, there was a cluster of American-looking sciency types (i.e. plaid shirts, hiking pants and hiking shoes, backpacks, apple laptops) standing out in a sea of chinese men in business suits. It only took about 3 seconds of eavesdropping to confirm my suspicions because seismologists can't go very long without talking about earthquakes.


So me and my new companions hopped the last flight to Chengdu, found our chinese hosts and just before midnight made it to our hotel: the Longhu Beach Hotel. The hotel, as it turns out, has nothing whatsoever to do with Beaches, there aren't any beaches in Chengdu. I feared that I brought my bathing suit for nothing, but luckily the shower drain didn't work and the shower flooded the bathroom with water so I got to go for a swim anyway. It was a nice luxurious hotel though, they gave me slippers, a bathrobe, a fancy desk and armchair and complimentary dried squid snacks. They had free internet too, but my email literally took 20 minutes to load. I think that's how long it took China to read and censor all my emails. but enough about that.

The first two days of the conference were dedicated to a field trip with chinese seismologists where we explored the fault scarp, landscape changes, and damages from the 2008 Mw 8.0 Wenchuan earthquake. This earthquake was one of the greatest disasters ever to strike the Sichuan province, killing about 80,000 people. Many of the building collapses were schools filled with children, a tragedy that has generated controversy over shoddy building techniques used in constructing the buildings housing the future of China.

Field Trip, day 1:

Departure: We pulled our jetlagged bodies out of bed and climbed sleepily into two tour buses. But we were promptly awoken by the unique driving style of our drivers (and everyone else in china). This typically involves charging full speed ahead in the desired direction and speeding up if there is a pedestrian or other solid object in the way while blasting the horn. If said solid object doesn't jump out of the way in terror, the next step is swerving into oncoming traffic to pass them. I decided it was best to sit in the back of the bus where I could live in ignorant bliss about what was happening up front.

We sped out of the city into the surrounding countryside past endless small farm plots tended by hand and people sweeping the side of the highway with straw brooms. These scenes starkly contrasted with the ultra-modern infrastructure under construction all around them, such as high speed rail that hosts trains as fast as the TGV and new highways and overpasses.

It was apparent from the second I arrived that China has a big problem with air pollution. There is an ever-present gray haze that blocks out the sun, and objects in the not-so-distant distance fade rapidly into the gray ether. Though not an ideal situation, and frustrating to eyes used to seeing clear views, it can add a strange beauty to the landscape. It even provides an element of surprise. For example, as we hurtled closer to our first stop across what seemed to be flat farmland stretching in all directions, all of a sudden the faint outline of enormous towering mountains popped out of the haze, as if they had sprung freshly out of the ground (see a foothill in the haze below). We had come to the edge of the Sichuan basin, the southeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau.


Soon after the mountains appeared and their outlines slowly became clearer (but never actually clear) and towered higher and higher above us, we entered what a sign in English called “tunnel region,” which turned out to be a quite accurate description, as we then darted through several multi-kilometer-long tunnels. Rumors says that they have all been built since the 2008 earthquake. The previous roads that followed the river were wiped away by landslides in the earthquake. An amazing engineering feat to build these tunnels so quickly.


First stop: The tunnels brought us higher and higher into the mountains, and after the last one, we popped out in the town of Yingxiu, high enough in elevation to allow some sunshine to penetrate the haze. What the sunlight illuminated was a landscape torn to pieces, first by landslides and debris flows, then intense reconstruction. Our Chinese geologist guides took us to a location by the Minjiang river where we had our first of many views of the fault scarp of the earthquake. At this place, the fault cut from where we stood, across the river and up a valley now filled with a newly constructed chute to funnel water from floods and debris flows away from populated areas. The ground on the hanging wall side uplifted 2.4 meters vertically at this location. The geologists dug a trench here across the fault and found offsets in the soil layers from the 2008 Wenchan earthquake and two others that they dated to have occurred about 3000 and 6000 years ago, suggesting a recurrence interval for similar earthquakes on this fault of 3000 years. (They are showing us a poster of the trenches they dug at this site)


Prior to the 2008 earthquake and subsequent studies, they had no historical record of any earthquakes larger magnitude 7 in this area and they considered the seismic risk to be relatively low… China has a historical record extending way further back in time than most places, but not back to the last event 3000 years ago. This highlights how much there is that we don’t know about where, when and what size earthquakes to expect in any one area because these judgments are often based on the historical record. Even the longest historical records for humans barely scratch the surface of understanding what happens on geologic time - yet another excuse to feel insignificant.

When the earthquake happened, the town of Yingxiu was devastated. Not only did many buildings collapse due to the shaking itself, but there were also massive landslides and debris flows that came down into the town, buried houses and also diverted the river through town. Now much of the town has been rebuilt with fresh houses and the river channelized way from it. There are so many people in China that they cannot simply abandon these areas near the fault so they just build everything back up again.

Stop 2: One part of town was not rebuilt, but was left in its wrecked state on purpose as an earthquake relic for tourists, the Middle school of Yingxiu. This was our next stop, along with many other buses of Chinese tourists. The Chinese have taken an interesting approach to recovery by leaving many of the damaged buildings intact and setting them up for tourism. I think this is a good approach because humans have a very short collective memory. Though I imagine it must be hard to live in Yingxiu and see the ruined middle school every day where maybe your children were killed or injured. See the memorial area below where people bring flowers for the dead and tourists come to see the ruins.


This stop was my first sight of real-life earthquake damage. Even from far away the sight of misshapen and twisted buildings knotted my stomach.

The first floor of one classroom building was completely flattened by the heavy floors on top. A student dormitory was just completely collapsed and no one could possibly survive inside, but luckily the students were in class at the time and those buildings fared slightly better.


Most buildings were mildly or severely off-kilter, with missing windows and walls, but furniture still inside. The poor construction was obvious, most walls had no rebar at all, just brick or unreinforced cement that crumble to pieces in an earthquake. Some select columns had some rebar, but it was so thin it might as well have been yarn. All of it was bent and twisted, at one location people were salvaging rebar from some ruins and they had a truck full of twisted metal that looked like fried noodles. At this place, just 40 children were killed, I say “just” because in many other places entire schools filled with children were crushed under the weight of the walls or in landslides. One of the prominent seismologists said that this town was lucky that only 40 died in the school, in some places the school collapsed killed hundreds. He still can't wipe from his mind what he saw when they began to lift away the rubble to find the children's bodies.


Stop 3: After our first of many such somber stops, we took a break from the tragedy to eat a traditional Sichuan style lunch in a newly developed tourist town in the mountains called Gaoyuan. This was the first of many meals eaten in the Chinese style. Everyone has a small plate or bowl and a pair of chopsticks, then the waitresses bring out plate after plate of food and put it on the center of the table, pile the plates in pyramids when the space runs out. Then everyone just directly grabs things with their chopsticks and moves it directly into their mouths or the little plate. Germaphobe Americans would not approve.


I quickly learned that the signature flavor of Sichuan food is SPICY! Some dishes are covered in piles of hot peppers (that you’re not supposed to eat, as some found out in an unfortunate way) along with spicy oil and shovels full of “Sichuan peppers” that make the tongue and lips numb and give a unique taste that I have never experienced before and therefore cannot describe. I also noticed that Sichuan food is extremely meat heavy…and not just any meat, but every meat. Nearly any part of any animal is fair game, including things such as pig feet and snout, many kinds of tripe, duck blood, sea cucumbers, trachea, tendons, weird looking fish with head and fins still attached and staring back disapprovingly, and many more unrecognizable things of which I probably don’t want to know the origin. And I ate these things, of course I had no idea what they were until a few days later. What a rapid transition I have made from eating no meat whatsoever for over 13 years to eating pig ears in just a few short months. They say eating pig ears improves hearing to pig-like levels. They also served us many different kinds of greens, and when we asked for the names, all of them were called “mountain vegetable.” Meaning that they are edible plants gathered from the nearby mountains, not cultivated. They were delicious.

Stop 4:

After lunch we strolled around the farmland near the restaurant in Gaoyuan because the fault actually cuts right through the village. This stop was more comical than tragic because the hanging wall of the fault that was uplifted popped part of a bicycle racing track a few meters into the air turning a regular bike race into BMX in mere seconds. Vertical offsets were something like a 2 meters at this location, you can see me holding up the uplifted bike racing track for scale.




Stop 5:

We then bused up some dirt roads into a rural valley with the fault running up the middle. We stopped by a steep gully where there appeared to be two houses, one on top of the gully and one below, but in fact that was once one house that was cut in half by uplift of about 5 meters at this location (see picture below)


The steep slope we stood over was new. Just up the hill from there was a closed restaurant and hotel. The building was fine, it did not collapse or have much structural damage from the shaking, but the main problem here were the giant boulders that bounced down the hill and crashed through the walls, including two neat holes punched into the walls of the restaurant in a scene straight out of looney tunes.


We poked around, snapping pictures like seismo-razzi when this lady came out and started speaking vigorously to us in Chinese. Of course I didn’t understand what she was saying so I backed away slowly, unsure if she was happy or upset. I later found out that she was agitated because we came around taking spectacular pictures and marveling at the damage (just like many other scientists, tourists, and government officials before us), but then we leave and nothing changes. Still three years later no one has done anything for her or her family except take away pictures. Her building and her life are still in ruins.

Just up the gully, we came across a paved road built precisely along the lineation of the fault. A car was driving on it when the earthquake hit and the driver, feeling the shaking and thinking he had a flat tire or something, got out of the car to check. Upon realizing that everything was shaking and the road uplifting below his feet, the driver fled. The fault lifted up right along the road and tilted it as an entact piece to about a 30-degree angle with the car still on it. The sideways car is still precariously perched there today.



We continued walking along the fault, past roaming chickens, scruffy dogs and wooden shacks, until we came to a temple that was also located nearly on top of the fault. When we arrived at the temple, there were pink balloons, tables and tents set up, and a lot of people milling about. The clink of glasses, mahjong tiles, and Chinese mumblings drifted out of a newly restored building nearby. A wedding celebration was going on - and we crashed it! I felt weird about it, but our Chinese hosts just walked right up the steps towards the temple so we followed and everyone from the wedding came outside to observe the parade of scruffy pale scientists file past.


The temple had been relocated to this spot from higher in the mountains right before the earthquake. This was an unfortunate decision because now the ancient temple has been destroyed. Nothing left but the severed stumps of the columns, piles of bricks, and a giant Buddha statue. The enormous temple bell was resting on the ground and the locals had built a temporary wood framed shack around the Buddha statues. I had never been to a Buddhist temple before and I was kind of taken aback when I stepped into the dark shack and was greeted by an enormous colorful smiling Buddha.


A few of the scientists paid their respects to the Buddha (and to the power of earthquakes perhaps) by burning incense on an altar outside.


We decided not to crash the wedding feast. According to my Chinese friends, for weddings, the family set up what are called “stream tables” and all the friends and relatives flow in over the course of a few days, eat a lavish meal, then flow away and are replaced by new relatives.

Stop 6:

I’m still writing about the first day and I’m on page 5 of my notes, and it’s not over yet. Long day! We stopped next at a tea house in the countryside where we sat in a pavilion in a garden, drank tea and chatted. The pavilion was on a little island in a pond and the garden was sprinkled with living statues where they had woven plants into elaborate pagodas and giant vases.


The Chinese typically drink tea in a way opposite to what I learned in the fancy tea shops in Seattle. They use a big tall glass, not any sort of tea cup or mug, throw in a bunch of green tea leaves and jasmine flowers without any sort of filter, pour in the hot water and drink it straight with the leaves still in there. They don’t remove the leaves after 1-2 minutes like we do to reduce the bitter taste, the same leaves can sit there for hours. The waitresses come by frequently and refill it with hot water. Interestingly, this tea didn’t get bitter after a while, perhaps it is the quality of the tea.

I had an interesting conversation with a Chinese scientist about earthquake prediction over tea. Most of the seismology world has given up on earthquake prediction and moved to probabilistic hazard assessment, mitigation, and early warning systems instead. The government of China, however, has mandated that it is the job of seismologists to predict earthquakes, even though there are no clear or agreed upon ways to do it. There was one successful prediction and evaluation in the 1970s because there was a very noticeable series of foreshocks where a town was evacuated countless lives were saved, but many many more failures. Foreshocks are the only known and accepted precursor, but there is not way to tell if a given earthquake is a foreshock or just a small regular earthquake until after the mainshock arrives, so they are not very useful in prediction.

After tea, we once again clustered around big tables for another enormous Sichuan feast, this time the plates stacked even higher, but were placed on a huge lazy susan so one can spin the table until the desired dish is within reach (or spin it away if the dish in front is too disturbing, boiled pigs feet for example). My favorite dish was the warm coconut-tapioca soup with gogi berries. Mmmm… This time I found myself at an entirely Chinese-speaking table and for a while I was constantly asking people ‘what did you say’ until I gave up and just laughed when they laughed. The good thing about sitting at a table like that is they can tell me exactly what each weird looking food was, though sometimes it’s better not to know.



End of day 1:

After returning to Chengdu, in order to stay awake till a reasonable hour and battle jetlag, I ventured out with three new-found friends to the center of Chengdu. The center is sleek and modern, with bright lights and luxury shops and a huge pedestrian mall. It was jam packed with people strutting about in their stylish clothes and eating street food.


My favorite thing about street-life at night is the dancing ladies. After dinner, tons of ladies meet in groups on the sidewalks and public squares and blast traditional Chinese music from speakers and dance together like a slow motion aerobics class with a chinese flair. Vera and I tried joining into a few of these, but we were always met with glares, I guess I’m not as good as I thought.


Finally I returned to the hotel, flooded the bathroom again and to make it even better, this time I ripped the entire towelrack off the wall simply by placing a towel on it. Too tired to care.